


No Reason To Hide From Me

by Aaron_The_8th_Demon



Series: Love Is A Different Kind Of Pain [3]
Category: Twin Peaks
Genre: Additional Warnings in Chapter Notes, Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Autistic Cooper, Bisexual Male Character, Developing Relationship, Heavy Angst, Ignores Season 3, Inconsistent chapter lengths, Internalized Homophobia, Internalized homophobia as a major plot point, Lodge dodge, M/M, Mental Health Issues, Panic Attacks, Past Child Abuse, Period-Typical Homophobia, Sexual Content
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-11
Updated: 2020-06-29
Packaged: 2021-03-02 05:13:20
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 15
Words: 31,073
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23909767
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Aaron_The_8th_Demon/pseuds/Aaron_The_8th_Demon
Summary: “Good morning, Harry!” Dale smiles, as if he hasn’t been passed out for almost two weeks straight and nothing is wrong.Harry’s not sure when his body decided to move itself without asking him first, but he first of all nearly drags Dale out of the bed for a hug and second of all practically crushes him doing it. Then Harry’s brain catches up. Dale’s hugging back, at least, which is good. Harry doesn’t have a name for this kind of fear, it’s not familiar, and he didn’t even know it was there until now. But Dale’s moving around again, and present, and warm to the touch. So that fear Harry didn’t know was there and can’t name is going away on its own.“It’s alright, Harry,” Dale murmurs finally, and Harry remembers how to let go again.
Relationships: Dale Cooper/Harry Truman
Series: Love Is A Different Kind Of Pain [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1718449
Comments: 102
Kudos: 52





	1. Avoiding Mistakes

**Author's Note:**

> Alright, look... this entire fic pretty much centers around Harry suffering alcoholism and the mental health problems associated with that. Any time you see him start to act "funny," as in it maybe seems almost out of character for him, it's because he's having a panic attack. This was a deliberate choice on my part as the writer. Cooper, god help him, is doing his best, but I finally gave in and just made him for reals autistic in this fic and he fucks up sometimes too.
> 
> Some very nasty things come up fairly frequently in this fic, including (but not limited to) panic attacks, vomiting, drinking binges, internal and external homophobia, and various points of struggle that are common to having an addiction. If any of these things trigger you, I would advise you to seek entertainment elsewhere.
> 
> Additional trigger warnings will be posted in the endnotes of each chapter if you want to check those first, assuming any apply.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hi, yeah, this was not supposed to be posted today. I was trying to edit the fucking tags and look what happened. *rolls eyes* I originally intended to start posting it on Friday this week. Sigh.

Harry finds it on his desk - he had to run out to his truck to grab his binoculars, and apparently someone snuck in here to leave a paper out where he could see it right away. He doesn’t know the handwriting and there’s no name… and, when he reads it through, he’s less concerned than he is confused.

_How long will the bed that we made together_ _  
_ _hold us there? Your stubbled cheeks grazed my skin_ _  
_ _from evening to dawn, a cloud of scattered_ _  
_ _particles now, islands of shaving foam_ _  
_ _slowly spiraling down the drain, blood drops_ _  
_ _stippling the water pink as I kiss_ _  
_ _the back of your neck, our faces framed inside_ _  
_ _a medicine cabinet mirror. The blade_ _  
_ _of your hand carves a portal out of steam,_ _  
_ _the two of us like boys behind frosted glass_ _  
_ _who wave goodbye while a car shoves off_ _  
_ _into winter. All that went unnoticed_ _  
_ _till now — empty cups of coffee stacked up_ _  
_ _in the sink, the neighborhood kids_ _  
_ _up to their necks in mounds of autumn leaves._ _  
_ _How months on a kitchen calendar drop_ _  
_ _like frozen flies, the flu season at its peak_ _  
_ _followed by a train of magic-markered_ _  
_ _xxx’s — nights we’d spend apart. Death must work_ _  
_ _that way, a string of long distance calls_ _  
_ _that only gets through to the sound of your voice_ _  
_ _on our machine, my heart’s mute confession_ _  
_ _screened out. How long before we turn away_ _  
_ _from flowers altogether, your blind hand_ _  
_ _reaching past our bedridden shoulders_   
_to hit that digital alarm at delayed_ _  
intervals — till you shut it off completely._

After a few seconds of straight up _what the hell?_ for Harry, his next feeling is to be kind of angry. Josie just left last night and now someone’s sending him this. It’s unreasonable.

But something about it is also kind of… familiar. His first idea is to crumple it up and throw it away. He doesn’t. A tiny corner of his mind tells him that would be a huge mistake. Instead, he folds it up and sticks it in his shirt pocket, then forgets all about it as he goes back to what he was doing before: looking out the window at the woods behind the station. He finds a woodpecker.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So... I know nothing about poetry first of all :D I did a Google search for poems that are good for a gay romance and this one felt best. Unfortunately we're also going to have to pretend that it's not also from 1997 and would therefore not exist at the time that Cooper is giving it to Harry. Oops. None of the other ones I saw were from any earlier than that, though, so I didn't have an especially wide range of options.


	2. Specific Fear

“Audrey woke up yesterday,” Harry says, trying to sound like he’s having an actual conversation instead of talking to himself in the same room as an unconscious person. “She’ll probably be up for questioning, soon. I’ll have to ask her about that explosion. But, uh. I might have Hawk do it instead. Then you won’t have to be here by yourself.”

Dale, of course, doesn’t answer or move or do anything at all except keep lying there. He fell into the mirror in his bathroom at the hotel, and when Harry picked him up off the floor his legs went out from under him again. Doc Hayward insisted on taking him to the hospital and on the ride up he just passed out. They put him on a stretcher in the parking lot and wheeled him away somewhere, ran a bunch of tests. That was ten days ago. He’s still not awake and Harry hasn’t gone home except to sleep. Visiting hours are really specific, but nobody bothers Harry, thank god. Nobody’s said anything yet.

“How much do you know about poetry, Coop?” he asks, not expecting an answer. “Someone left me one a little while back and I don’t know who it was. I wanna ask you about it when you’re up for it.”

The situation is all kinds of bad. Not a single doctor in the place can figure out what the hell is wrong with this poor man. Harry hasn’t been doing his job, he wore these same clothes yesterday, he’s getting scruffy. He goes home and drinks until he falls asleep and then comes here the next morning. Andy brings him food from the diner. Something’s wrong with Harry, too, and he has no idea what. The only thing he’s sure of is that it won’t right itself again until Dale wakes up and is okay.

Speaking of food.

“Harry, I got your lunch.” Andy always whispers when he comes in here, like he’s scared to wake Dale even though that seems pretty unlikely by now. “Lucy saved you a donut from this morning, too, so I put it in there.”

“Thanks, Andy.”

“You know, Sheriff, I bet he’s just as worried about you as you are about him right now,” Andy comments.

That’s just weird and for a second Harry has no idea what to say.

“Andy, he’s not even awake right now.”

“I just have this feeling…” Andy starts to explain, but then stops.

“What?”

“I just have this feeling,” he says again. “Last night, me and Lucy were talking about Agent Cooper, and she said once she read somewhere that sometimes when people are in comas they’re not really sleeping. They can still hear everything.”

“Hm.”

“So after she said that, I have this feeling that it could be what’s going on. I think he could be listening to you.”

Harry really hates this conversation, somehow, so he nods. “Thanks, Andy.” He says it as dismissively as he possibly can.

“You’re welcome, Sheriff.” Andy leaves, thank god.

Harry shakes his head and rubs his face, then opens the takeout box and picks at the food there. He’ll end up throwing half of it away like he’s been doing, but he drinks the entire cup of coffee and chokes down the donut after it.

“Maybe it’s because they don’t give you enough coffee,” Harry muses, glancing at Dale. “I bet if they filled up an IV bag full of it just for you, you’d wake right up again.” He shoves his half-eaten lunch away and rests a hand on Dale’s shoulder. He’s so boney under the thin patient gown, and he’s kinda cold, probably because he’s just lying there being still. Harry gets up and pulls the blankets a little higher on him. “Y’know, I bet that’s the first thing you’re gonna want, too. Soon as you wake up, Coop, I promise, I’ll bring you the best damn cup of coffee you ever drank.”

* * *

Harry drives to the hospital hungover, just like he’s done the last nine mornings. Today will be day eleven that he sits on his ass in a hospital room doing nothing. His brain feels like it’s being crushed by the back of his forehead, but he’s used to that by now. He stops and drinks from the water fountain in the hall before getting on the elevator.

“Morning, Coop.” Harry sits, settles in a little. He usually dozes off during the first hour or so and then stays awake for the rest of the day. It’s part of his new routine. “Don’t mind me.”

Harry tilts his hat so that it covers his aching eyes and slides down a little further in the chair. The nurses all know to expect him, they leave him alone when they come in to do Dale’s vitals at the start of their shift. The world falls away from him and he naps. There are people talking in his head as he dreams. _Oh, I’m sorry! I’ll go and get a second breakfast, I heard Pete Martell said the food here’s real bad after he got smoke inhalation. It’s fine, Andy. I’m sure I’ll be able to make do with what the staff brings me. But Agent Cooper, if you don’t eat good food, you’ll take longer to get better._ A quiet, indulgent chuckle. _Alright, Andy, if you insist._

Harry shifts around in the chair some. He can hear a nurse talking, and there’s something in his hand. He lets go of it but it finds him again, and then he falls back asleep. He wakes up for real a few minutes later - there’s two takeout boxes on the bedside table, a full coffee mug with an empty coffee mug beside it. Dale is watching him and holding his hand.

“Good morning, Harry!” he smiles, as if he hasn’t been passed out for almost two weeks straight and nothing is wrong.

Harry’s not sure when his body decided to move itself without asking him first, but he first of all nearly drags Dale out of the bed for a hug and second of all practically crushes him doing it. Then Harry’s brain catches up. Dale’s hugging back, at least, which is good. Harry doesn’t have a name for this kind of fear, it’s not familiar, and he didn’t even know it was there until now. But Dale’s moving around again, and present, and warm to the touch. So that fear Harry didn’t know was there and can’t name is already going away on its own.

“It’s alright, Harry,” Dale murmurs finally, and Harry remembers how to let go again.

Now he just feels really weird and awkward. He sits in the chair again, looking between the floor and the wall and then clearing his throat. “ _Hgm._ Uh. I’m glad you’re feeling better.”

“Actually, Harry, at the current moment I feel terrible that you’ve been taking such poor care of yourself because of me,” Dale answers. “After you’ve eaten I’d like you to go home, shower, shave, and then please go to work instead of wasting all your time here when it’s not necessary.”

“It’s not wasting time,” Harry argues, opening one of the boxes and handing it to Dale before grabbing the other one for himself.

“I’ll feel exceedingly guilty if you lose your job on my account.”

“Eat your eggs, Coop.”

They’re quiet for a couple minutes, listening to each other chew. It’s nice, even if it’s a little unusual for Dale to not be talking for once. Sometimes it seems like that’s how Dale breathes, and on most people that would be incredibly obnoxious, but on him it’s kinda endearing. Most of the time Harry likes hearing Dale talk.

As he’s starting on his bacon, the silence breaks again.

“Harry, I can appreciate that you were frightened,” he starts. “And ultimately your behavior is up to you. But I’d prefer at the very least for you to go home and freshen yourself up first if you’re going to spend the entire day here in my room.”

“Dale-”

“Harry, I can tell by the smell clinging to your clothes exactly how much whiskey you drank last night.”

Oh. He didn’t even think of that.

Harry sighs. “Okay, Coop. You win.”

Dale, as always with no ego to be found, doesn’t look triumphant when he says that - just relieved on his behalf. “Thank you, Harry. Now, I also believe there were mentions of coffee.”

“What?”

“Yesterday, you promised that as soon as I woke up you would bring me coffee.”

Oh, right, Harry did say that. “How’d you know?”

“Not all comatose people are unconscious.”

“Then why were you like this at all?”

“Harry, entry into a place such as the Black Lodge is an extremely unnatural event that apparently has effects to physically disturb the person doing it. I simply lost control of my faculties for a period of time. So, it seems fortunate now for you that you didn’t see fit to confess any embarrassing secrets to me while you thought I was out,” Dale grins.

Harry can’t believe he’s getting teased right now. “This isn’t funny, Coop. You scared the shit outta me when you did this.”

“I understand, and I’m very sorry for that.”

Harry sighs. “It’s okay, at least you’re back now.” He scarfs down his last piece of bacon and stands up. “I’ll be back in probably half an hour or so with your coffee.”


	3. Indefinite Stay

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> We get For Reals Autistic Cooper in this chapter! All my fellow neurodivergents, please enjoy! ^_^

“I hope you’re up on your tetanus shots, Coop,” Harry comments as they unload everything from the back of his truck.

“I am, I just had a booster last year,” Dale answers.

He’s only been out of the hospital for four days - Harry would hate to see him landing himself back there again so soon because a fish hook went into his finger.

They carry the stuff inside to his kitchen and pile it on the table. “So, I hope this was more pleasant than the fishing trip you took with Garland.”

“Infinitely. I would’ve been extremely upset if you’d been stolen from me this afternoon, Harry.”

Harry snorts as he pulls out a knife and gets to work cleaning the first fish. “Yeah, but I don’t have the weird mental stuff going on that you two do, so it probably wouldn’t happen anyway.”

He gives Dale a knife as well and teaches him how to do it, because with two of them it won’t take forever (or at least slightly less than forever). Dale’s a quick student and in about five minutes is gutting and scaling like he’s been doing it his whole life. Because of course. This is Dale Cooper - he’s perfect in every way. There isn’t a single thing Harry can think of right now that this handsome FBI agent can’t do.

“Harry, may I ask why you’re staring at me?” Dale says, amusement coloring his voice.

“What? Oh. Sorry.”

“It’s alright. What’s on your mind?”

“You’re good at everything.”

“Not true, Harry. I’m terrible at romantic relationships. That doesn’t stop me from trying, however.”

“Yeah, join the club,” Harry mutters, trying as hard as he can not to be too bitter.

“Harry, what happened with Josie wasn’t your fault.”

“I know, but… maybe I could’a stopped things from ending the way they did.”

“It’s possible, but I don’t see any means for you to return to that time and make different choices,” Dale points out gently.

Harry reaches back to the conversation they had in his office, the morning after Dale got taken hostage by Jean Renault and Sergeant King. “But I bet you probably wished the same thing, at least for awhile.”

“Yes, I did,” Dale agrees. “And it didn’t help a bit. There were many nights for over a year where I couldn’t get the idea out of my head and I fell asleep crying in an empty apartment. It’s a major flaw of my character, Harry… I tend towards the obsessive and this was no exception. Usually, I’m able to turn it into an advantage, but back then it only served to further injure my soul. It only stopped because I buried myself in my job. I have essentially no life outside the Bureau, and if you were to closely examine my existence you’d likely determine it to be pointless and empty. This is the first vacation I’ve taken since it happened.” Dale stops cleaning his fish, turns, makes eye contact. “Harry, I understand the difficulties you currently face, but it would pain me more than you can imagine if you force me to watch you fall into a similar fate. Maintain contact with your friends and live outside of your job, please. Don’t be obsessive like I am.”

Harry frowns. “Is that why you kept trying to kick me outta your hospital room?”

“Yes.”

They both turn back to the counter.

“Hey, uh, speaking of Caroline actually, I know you sent her that poem once but how much do you know about poetry in general?”

“Not much more than the general population. Often a person defaults to love poetry as if no other kind exists. I’m aware of the other types, but love poetry is the only kind I interact with.”

“Someone left something on my desk awhile back, I wanted to ask you about it but I kept forgetting until now.”

“I see.” Dale, for some damn reason, is giving his current partly-cleaned fish a huge smile.

“It’s kinda weird, it seems romantic but also - not, I don’t know how to describe it.”

“It was given to you with the express purpose of describing romantic feelings to you at a time when the sender was unable or unwilling, or both, to speak about the topic with you directly.”

Harry snorts. “Am I that intimidating?”

“No, you aren’t, but your relationship with Josie made you inaccessible.”

“Oh yeah.” Harry’s still amazed at Dale’s investigative skills… how anyone could put all that together just from his vague descriptions is beyond him, but it’s really impressive. “Coop, how are you so good at that?”

“Harry, would it surprise you to learn that I haven’t the faintest idea how to read facial expressions?”

“Uh… yeah, a little.”

“Well, let it be known that I’m unable to comprehend what a person is thinking solely based on the look they put on for me. Instead my intuition simply tells me the undertones of their thoughts and feelings. I have terrible facial recognition as well, incidentally. Instead I recognize people by the sound of their voice and assign the name they tell me to that voice, and that’s how I remember people I don’t know well.”

“Okay. So… what does that have to do with anything?”

“On a very deep and incomprehensible level, my neurons simply don’t function in the same manner as the common man’s. I didn’t learn conventional social skills until I was seven and a half years old, because that was the point when my intuition began informing me that everyone around me was constantly annoyed and upset by my behavior. Prior to that I was considered a rude and developmentally slow child.”

Harry can’t even imagine anyone labelling Dale as _developmentally slow._ It’s just impossible.

“So your psychic… whatever that you’ve got going on is how you know people are lying to you?”

“Yes. In effect, it accounts for my entire social sense. I understand it’s not like this for most people, and at times I still wonder how it is to see a person for only the second time and immediately recall their face and their name. It must be wonderful and extremely convenient.”

Harry just nods. He can’t make any of this fit together, so he doesn’t even try, he just swallows it whole and stops questioning it. “Okay.”

“Thank you for not giving in to the confusion and morbid curiosity that most of the other people I’ve told about this have usually experienced, Harry.”

“You’re welcome…?”

“You’re a good friend.”

“I do my best, Coop.”

They plow through the rest of the fish and set some aside to get cooked, then the rest are packed up and stuck in Harry’s freezer. After that he’s running back and forth between his grill and his deep fryer for a little while, one with fish and the other with french fries, and once that ordeal’s over with they sit on his porch with plates of food and bottles of beer. It’s only April and it’s not actually warm enough for this yet, but Dale doesn’t seem to care as he squirts just barely enough ketchup to count for something on his fries. Harry dips his in a tub of sour cream.

“How long’re you planning on staying before you go back to work?”

“Indefinitely. It’s possible for me to continue working for the Bureau while having a permanent residence here. I spoke with Gordon yesterday on this topic and he’s allowing it, so it’s what I intend to do.”

“Really.”

“Harry, I’m unashamedly enamored with your corner of the world.”

Harry swallows his pride. “I’m glad you’re staying.”

“Well, I’ll be away for several weeks at a time, but now I’ll always return here and not to some noisy oversized city that’s choking on its own car exhaust,” Dale comments. “I have no desire to abandon the wonderful friends I’ve made during my time here and the trees, of course, continue to astound me. There are so many things to love in Twin Peaks and I desire very strongly to keep them within reach.”

“Even after all the bad shit that’s happened to you here?”

“Harry, I can confidently assure you that it doesn’t in any way measure up to the level of bad shit that’s happened to me in some other places,” Dale grins.

Harry chuckles. “If you say so, Coop.”

“Harry, I’m in love.”

“Annie Blackburn.”

“Well… no. While I was incapacitated and hospitalized, I spent some amount of time thinking during the times you were absent or napping and came to realize a difficult truth about my relationship with Annie. She reminded me very much of Caroline… it was something of an unhealthy attachment. I was chasing the ghost of a feeling I could no longer experience and it wasn’t fair to her.”

“I’m real sorry to hear that, Coop. You seemed pretty happy.”

“It’s a difficult emotion to explain - but, since that realization, I’ve returned my attentions to someone who caught my eye prior to her arrival.”

“Well, good luck with that,” Harry says, completely seriously. “I hope it works out for you.”

“It largely depends on the other party,” Dale smiles. His eyes are bright and his mood is even more charming than usual - being in love looks good on him. Harry’s quietly jealous but doesn’t say anything. “I seem to have stolen the attention from your mysterious gift, Harry. Why don’t you bring it here?”

“Sure.” Harry stuffs a couple fries into his mouth before getting up and going in - he has to dig around through a few drawers before he finds it. Sitting back down outside again, he hands it over: “Here.”

Dale, very confusingly, doesn’t actually read it. Instead he unfolds it, pulls a pen out of his shirt pocket, and starts scrawling something. What’s even stranger about it is Harry could’ve sworn until now that he wrote right-handed, but today he’s using his left.

The paper is passed back over.

_I taught myself to be ambidextrous in order to disguise my handwriting for undercover work. I wrote this for you and left it on your desk in order to put the idea in your head, and to help approach the topic in a way that’s hopefully not too jarring or sudden._

The handwriting matches. Way too many things suddenly make a hell of a lot more sense, and Harry didn’t even notice them not making sense before now. Dale watches him with an expression he can’t read.

“So… it was _you_ I got mad at. You left this the morning after Josie left with Jonathan.”

“Yes. I hadn’t had enough coffee that morning and so acted slightly impulsively.”

“Well… why’d you do it, Coop?”

“Presumably because I feel romantically inclined towards you, Harry.”

Everything in his brain screams at him to say no and then to run. What if people find out?

“But we’re both men.”

“Yes, I’m aware of this,” Dale nods, exasperated and amused both at once. “Harry, please permit me to tell you that you’re intelligent and handsome and compassionate. From the beginning you’ve remained open-minded and accepting of my rather unorthodox methods of investigation and I have a great appreciation for your friendship. You’re charming and you have a kind heart, and if you have any good reason for me not to find any or all of those qualities lovable and attractive, please inform me of it.”

“Dale…” Harry can’t even think of a way to continue that sentence. He never expected this.

“I’d also like to point out at this time that you sat vigil in my hospital room for ten days waiting for me to regain my faculties, and this is after you sat vigil outside the Black Lodge for fifty hours without sleeping until I returned.”

That’s a really good point and Harry has no argument against it. The idea that it’s Dale who gave him this poem makes him a lot less upset about it, too.

“Coop, I… I don’t know what to say,” he finally decides on. And it’s true. He doesn’t have a god damn clue about this.

Dale, somehow, seems really unconcerned that this is his answer. He goes back to his food instead of saying anything else, finishing up his french fries and going after a piece of fish. Harry, on the other hand, sits there in shock and can’t even remember that his beer will go flat if he doesn’t drink it fast enough. Normally he’s really good at finishing alcohol in a timely manner.

“Harry, didn’t your parents ever teach you that if you don’t finish your dinner you can’t have dessert?” Dale teases him eventually.

Oh, right. They grabbed a pie from the diner on the drive back from the lake.

“Uh.”

Dale smiles and shakes his head. “Harry, you’ll have to speak to me again eventually.”

It’s like Harry swallowed his own tongue somehow. The words just won’t come. He’s got no way to explain how he feels about this - shocked, first of all, or something even bigger than shocked. And then this really confusing thing where he should be horrified but he… isn’t. Actually the worst part is that he’s really, really flattered, and he knows that reasonably speaking he shouldn’t be. He shouldn’t be flattered. He should be shocked and horrified. So far he’s only gotten one of those things right. And all of this has him floored.

“I’m gathering by your extensive silence that giving you some time to process this information may be prudent,” Dale comments.

“Um. Yeah,” Harry agrees. Finally, he’s forced himself to come up with words again.

Of course, the issue doesn’t just get dropped there. It never does with Dale.

“Harry, I’d just like you to know that I appreciate more than I can say all the time you spent with me in the hospital even though you believed I was unconscious. It was significantly less unpleasant than it could’ve been because you were present and you spoke to me fairly frequently. The morning that I woke up and could move again, the first person I saw was you, and that made me exceedingly happy. My previous extended hospital stay was following the stabbing incident, and there was nobody to sit and wait for me then. But you sat for ten days. Most people wouldn’t do such a thing.”

“I was just so worried…”

Dale nods. “It’s alright, Harry.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So when Cooper is describing having autism (without even knowing for himself that he has this condition) and talks about remembering people by their voices, that's something I do. I'm very auditory and I decided to inflict that on him for the purposes of this fic. Why? Because I can.
> 
> So for the handwriting thing, I got the idea from (of course) something else that I do... when I was in 4th grade a window smashed every bone in my hand, so I had to learn to be right-handed because I was in a cast for-fucking-ever. So I'm ambidextrous. When I write in English, I write lefty, and when I write in Russian, I write righty so that I can keep the two alphabets separate and fuck up less often. This only works if I'm not trying to actively translate something because then sometimes I have to switch back-and-forth and then I start writing English words in Cyrillic letters lol :D and this seems like something Cooper would be able to do, too. So he taught himself to write with both hands in order to infiltrate during his cases.
> 
> Oh, yeah, I have absolutely no respect for Cooper's "relationship" with Annie and I will use any and every excuse I can think of to get her out of his life. She's such a badly-written character (the writers were so obviously trying way too hard with her) and also you cannot convince me that logical, thorough, methodical Cooper would see someone and instantly be in love with them. I don't think I've ever explicitly said in a fic that it was love-at-first-sight between him and Harry, either, only that it was "nearly the entire time they've known each other." NEARLY. That still gives Cooper space to start feeling attraction to Harry without it being ridiculous.


	4. Ordinary Occurrences

“Where do you want this chair, Agent Cooper?” Andy asks.

“That corner between the two windows,” Dale grunts as he and Harry drag the couch up to the wall.

“Agent Cooper, don’t you have any pictures to put up?” Lucy questions as she goes through one of his boxes.

“No, I don’t care for photographs most of the time.”

“Then how are you going to decorate? I don’t want to tell you how your own house should look but if you just leave the walls empty people might think that you-”

The hand goes up. “Lucy, it’s not a problem. A few pieces of tasteful artwork will be chosen for this exact purpose in the near future.” Dale frowns. “Lucy, is my coffee-maker in that box?”

She digs for a second. “Yes, it’s here.”

“Wonderful. Would you please put it in an easily-accessible area of my kitchen? That’s the most important item I own.”

Harry forces himself not to laugh when he hears that, but he can’t stop himself from grinning, especially when he sees the giant cardboard box labeled in big marker letters _books about Tibet_. “Never change, Coop.”

Dale just gives him a confused look when he says that before getting back to the task at hand. “Harry, will you help me with this rug, please?”

They spend a solid five minutes positioning the damn thing until it’s lined up exactly where Dale wants it, but that’s partly because Hawk comes in to pile more boxes and Dale keeps stopping to direct him. Finally the rug is in the best spot apparently, because then they pick up the coffee table and place that over top. The four of them sit down for a second.

“Housewarming gifts?” Harry suggests.

“Seems like a good time,” Hawk agrees, nodding.

“Hey, Lucy!” Harry calls towards the kitchen. “Housewarming gifts.”

“Okay, Sheriff!” She passes through and heads out to Harry’s truck, then reappears again a few seconds later to give him a cardboard crate.

“Okay, Coop. This one’s from Norma.” He hands over a takeout box that’s not wrapped and obviously has a cherry pie inside. “This one’s from Ed, he would’ve come up to help all this but an eighteen-wheeler broke down yesterday and his hands are full.” Dale unwraps it - a bag of coffee grounds. “This one’s from Hawk.” Unwrapped: another bag of coffee grounds. Dale starts to laugh. “These are both from Lucy and Andy, so you can do them together.” Two more bags of coffee grounds. Dale’s absolutely losing it. “And this one’s from me.” A fifth bag.

Dale bends over with his arms over his stomach and drops all his coffee as he goes through a fit of hysterics. Harry gathers them off the floor and piles them on the coffee table, snickering a little himself… they got exactly the result they wanted, because Dale clearly loves this.

Eventually Dale can hold himself together again. He clears his throat through a huge smile. “I’m taking this to mean that either you all know me well or that I’m extremely predictable. In any event, perhaps we should enjoy some of this now… did we find the box yet that has the mugs in it?”

“Yeah, I just saw that one a couple minutes ago,” Hawk answers.

“Perfect.” Dale stands up and goes for the kitchen with a randomly-selected bag of coffee in his hand.

Once Hawk locates the box with the dishes, Harry follows Dale with it and sets it on the counter. “Any particular cupboard you want these in?”

“That one,” Dale points.

Harry sets out five coffee cups first, then unpacks the rest of the box and begins loading them into the cabinet beside the refrigerator. Out in the living room he can hear Lucy and Hawk opening some of the other boxes and start rearranging them a little.

“So how long until your next case?”

“It won’t be for some time, I have a training seminar in DC next week that I have to attend.”

“What about?”

“Human trafficking… generally speaking, an uncomfortable if not outright disgusting subject. Fortunately I’ve never been assigned to such a case before, I’ve seen many terrible things during my career but that may be one I couldn’t stomach.”

“Really?”

“Special attention will be called to the trafficking of children, Harry.”

“That’s awful, Coop.”

“My profession has some truly discouraging moments at times.”

“Yeah… Judge Sternwood said it best. We have hard jobs.”

“We do. But we also chose to have these jobs and we can’t imagine other men taking our place, now can we?” Dale points out.

Harry shakes his head and doesn’t answer, turning back to piling up the plates in the cupboard. He listens to the coffee maker starting to do its thing, and beyond that the other three unloading boxes in the living room and arguing about where they should stick certain things or whether they should just wait for Dale to tell them where he wants the stuff.

“Oh, Harry, leave some of the smaller plates, it stands to reason we should break into that pie as well.”

“Sure thing.” Harry ends up leaving for a second to go find the box that has the silverware in it, and after that he’s piling spoons and forks into the drawer. “So there’s no boxes out there that say ‘pots and pans’ on them.”

“I don’t know how to cook.”

“It’s not that hard. Can you read, Coop?”

“Yes.”

“There you go. My mom always said ‘if you can read, you can cook.’ She also said just because me and Frank were boys was no excuse for us to not learn how, either. I’m a little better at it than he is, but you’d be amazed what he can do with a gas grill.”

“Harry, I’d like to inform you that I once set fire to my apartment in Philadelphia with a frying pan.”

“Well, if that happens you know you’re doing it wrong,” Harry laughs.

And then Dale is in his space, lightly plucking five forks out of his hand.

“While I was out-of-state gathering my possessions to move them here, were you able to give any serious consideration to everything I said?” he murmurs.

“Dale…” Harry closes his mouth, sighs through his nose, shakes his head. “The town will drag me out of my house and lynch me in the street.”

“Has that happened before?”

“Technically no, it hasn’t, but I remember one time back in… I think 1975, something like that-”

“Harry, that was almost fifteen years ago. Things are changing, now. It’s much better than it used to be. I understand and appreciate that due to your position in the community it makes you feel particularly vulnerable to criticism, but I’d like to see you be happy. I desire to be allowed to make you happy. I love you.”

Harry doesn’t even remember the last time anyone said that to him. And the last time he said it himself, it was to Josie. Look how that turned out.

Logically, Harry knows exactly what he’s supposed to do: take a step or two back, say ‘no’ in the nicest way possible, and return to the task at hand. But then there’s a huge mistake… Harry makes eye contact. And all his logic goes right out of his head. Normally, Dale’s hazel eyes are bright, intelligent, seeing everything especially if it’s something no other person could possibly notice. Now, they’re impossibly afraid, begging Harry not to turn him down. Most of the time he’s so confident and perfect that Harry’s forgotten until this moment that he’s still a human being, that things go wrong for him, he has insecurities buried really deep in there that almost nobody knows about.

“Dale, I think…” Harry stops. What does he think? How can he continue that sentence?

They’d have to keep it a secret. Well, Harry’s relationship with Josie was a secret, so that’s not new to him. Harry’s been really unlucky in love until now. Well, so has Dale, so they’re on even footing. Harry’s self-aware enough to understand that a big thing for him is that he needs to be needed. Is he really necessary for Dale’s life?

“What do you think, Harry?” Dale whispers.

“What do you need from me?”

This gets him a smile, and then hands sliding into his own. “I’m able to operate autonomously, but I don’t enjoy it. I prefer the experience and fulfillment afforded by consistent companionship, and I like to be cuddled. Besides, I still can’t cook.”

Harry snorts. “Oh, well then, you’re after me so I can make you food. I see how it is.”

Dale chuckles. “Only one of a very long list of reasons, Harry.”

Slowly, very slowly, Dale inches closer to him. Harry knows he should back up, or at least that he should _want_ to back up in the first place, but he doesn’t and even if he did his feet have glued themselves down to the linoleum somehow.

It’s light, not some wild passionate thing like in a movie, and it doesn’t last more than a couple seconds. Actually this almost doesn’t even count as a real kiss. But they both close their eyes and Dale doesn’t move away after, he just sort of hovers there with an inch and a half separating their faces. Harry hesitates briefly but then follows after him, and they’re kissing again a little more firmly than last time but still slowly and absolutely quietly. Their friends are in the other room, they don’t want attention drawn to this. Or at least Harry doesn’t.

“The coffee’s done,” Dale whispers against his lips.

“Oh. Uh. Right.”

They step back from each other and Harry serves up slices of pie onto the plates while Dale pours the mugs. His brain feels like scrambled eggs… this is a thing, apparently. He’s going to be seeing another man. But thinking about it that’s really the only difference - in his rare relationships, it’s usually someone _way_ far out of his league to begin with and they make a move on him, not the other way around. That’s not unique to Dale and before Dale it wasn’t unique to Josie, either. Harry doesn’t like that. He doesn’t like that there’s an obvious pattern to this shit, because he’s really not interested in more heartbreak.

Carrying pie into Dale’s new living room, Harry’s train of thought is derailed right away by Lucy grumbling as she hands over a pile of cash to a triumphantly smirking Hawk. Andy’s digging around in his pants pocket and comes up with money, too, looking really unhappy about it.

“What’s going on over here?” Harry wonders, distributing plates.

“I won a huge bet,” Hawk says.

“Yeah, I can see that. What’s everyone gambling on?”

“The whole station has a pool going and we each picked a time-frame for how long it’d take after Agent Cooper moved here for you two to just admit you have the hots for each other. I said right away, so now I’ll have about two hundred dollars in cash by the end of the week.”

“You were taking bets on me?” Harry demands, embarrassed and angry.

“Actually, Sheriff, we always take bets on you, you’ve just never noticed until now because usually the winner of the pool collects on it when you’re not looking except this time Hawk thought it would be funny if you could see just how unsubtle you actually are,” Lucy explains.

“Who usually wins, Lucy?” Dale asks, appearing with the coffee.

“Me,” she says. “That’s why Hawk’s being such a bad winner, he’s happy that he got it right for once.” Her voice is dripping with spite and she glares at Hawk, who just grins at her in reply.

Harry covers his face with his palms like it’ll save him somehow. “Y’know, I’m really tempted to fire all of you right now,” he threatens, not actually meaning it.

“Well, Sheriff, it’s mostly my fault,” Andy tells him. “I could see through the doorway from here. So if someone gets fired it should really be me.”

Harry groans. “Andy, I’m not actually gonna fire anyone for this. That doesn’t mean I want you all to keep doing shit like this. No more bets.”

Everyone else starts eating their pie and drinking their coffee. Harry just sits there on one end of the couch, thinking to himself that the entire station already knew before Dale even kissed him and there’s no way he’ll be able to keep this under wraps. Now when he goes out on calls people might chase him off their property with a shotgun. An even more terrifying thought springs up: they might ask questions, why he didn’t tell them that he’s… And the answer is he didn’t know. Or at least it never occurred to him. But it also doesn’t make sense because Harry’s sure, he’s _really sure,_ that he was attracted to Josie, he did love her. He was attracted to his other girlfriends in the past. And yet now here’s Dale, who he was kissing just a couple minutes ago.

“Harry, are you feeling alright?” Dale asks softly from the other end of the couch.

“What?”

“You’re staring off into space and you haven’t drank your coffee.”

“I’m fine. Um.” He clears his throat. “I’m fine. Just thinking.” Harry takes a huge gulp of coffee and pretends like it doesn’t choke him, like he doesn’t feel like having something in his stomach will make him throw up. What he really wants right now is some liquor. At least he still knows what that is.

Dale, very obviously, knows that Harry’s lying. Thankfully, though, he doesn’t say anything.

Harry manages to force down most of his coffee and as they get back to work he refuses to keep thinking about this, about how he apparently has no idea who he really is or about how he didn’t have a single bite of his pie. He moves around objects and unloads boxes, and while doing those things he doesn’t let himself think at all.

* * *

The phone rings. Harry falls down three times between getting up from the couch and answering it.

“H’lo?”

“Harry are you drinking?” comes Dale’s voice.

Harry sits down on the floor, holding the phone in both hands so that he doesn’t drop it. “Yeah. So what.”

“Harry…”

“Yeah, Coop.”

“Do you mind if I come over?”

“I jus’ saw you this afternoon… helped you move all your shit…”

“Well, I’d like to have a conversation with you and it would be preferable for that not to take place over a phone line.”

Harry can’t get a fix on that, so he just agrees. “Okay. Yeah.”

“I’ll be over in about twenty minutes.”

Harry doesn’t bother to move and actually hang up the phone. He just sits there and zones out for awhile, and then Dale’s coming into his house.

“Hey, Coop.”

“Harry how much have you had to drink?”

“Jus’ one.”

“I find that difficult to believe.”

“Really, jus’ one. Jus’ one bottle.”

Why isn’t Dale laughing? It’s hysterical.

“Harry have you had an entire bottle of whiskey?”

“Yup.”

Dale looks really, really sad now. Harry can’t figure out why. He watches Dale come over and hang up the phone for him, and then he’s being pulled off the floor and put in one of his kitchen chairs. Dale sits across from him.

“Harry.”

“Hm.”

“Please tell me what’s wrong.”

“No thanks.” Harry puts his head down on the table.

A palm on his knuckles… the warmth, the softness, it feels so nice.

“Are you upset with me for kissing you?”

“No.” Harry can admit this, now, because after all that whiskey it’s stopped scaring him as much. Whiskey is his favorite thing ever. “No. I liked you kissin’ me, Coop.”

“Alright… well, that’s good.”

“Yeah.”

“Does this have something to do with the monetary exchange that took place in my new living room?”

“Ever’one a’ready knows,” Harry moans, slumping forward even further. “The whole station… Dale… ’s not okay. They know.”

A second palm, now, brushing down his hair. Dale has such nice hands.

“But Harry, you seem to be overlooking a crucial fact - according to Hawk, one hundred percent of the staff took part in this betting pool. As I understand it, that means it’s highly probable that they all simply accept this as an ordinary occurrence. It’s true that they’re all aware, but from my observations it seems that they’re all also perfectly fine with it.”

“There’s gonna be questions, though…”

“Oh?”

“Yeah.”

“What questions, Harry?”

“People’re gonna ask why… why I’m not… Coop, I didn’t even know I’m not normal.”

Dale sighs, but it’s not mean or annoyed. “Contrary to popular belief it’s not abnormal to be capable of being attracted to more than one type of person. It doesn’t change who you are, either.”

Harry closes his eyes and just lets Dale pet down his curls for awhile. He doesn’t really see the need to talk about this anymore, he likes Dale feeling his hair.

“A’the hospital…”

“Yes?”

“I got so scared.”

“Yes, I know.”

“I got so scared, Coop. I thought. Maybe. ’Cause I just lost Josie before that… y’know… and… I got so scared… an’then I had a nap, and you held my hand. Was so nice. I liked that.”

“I was listening to your voice the entire time,” Dale murmurs. “That was the only sound I wanted to hear while I was awake. It made it bearable, knowing you were always there with me.”

“They kep’ kickin’ me out a’night.”

One of Harry’s fists is lightly picked up from the table. He feels Dale kiss his knuckles.

“Thank you, Harry. Thank you for being there with me.”

“Y’re welcome.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So one of Harry's big problems in this fic is that he has no concept of a middle ground. He doesn't particularly understand that he's bisexual despite Cooper mentioning it to him and so he's confused about it, and that distresses him.


	5. Crisis

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> GUYS
> 
> STOP RIGHT HERE
> 
> BECAUSE OF THE THING AO3 WAS DOING ON THURSDAY 21 MAY, EMAILS GOT ALL FUCKED UP
> 
> SO IF YOU ARE SUBSCRIBED TO THIS FIC OR SOMETHING AND DIDN'T GET AN EMAIL THAT THE FIC UPDATED YOU MAY HAVE MISSED THE PREVIOUS CHAPTER
> 
> IF YOU HAVE NOT READ THAT CHAPTER GO BACK AND READ IT BEFORE YOU START THIS ONE
> 
> IF YOU'RE NOT SURE: LAST CHAPTER STARTED WITH HARRY AND THE GANG HELPING COOPER MOVE INTO HIS NEW HOUSE
> 
> THIS CONCLUDES OUR PUBLIC SERVICE ANNOUNCEMENT THANK YOU

It’s been three days now and Harry already can’t stand this anymore.

Dale was half-right: the whole staff taking bets on him means all his officers are fine with the idea of Harry being anything less than straight as a yardstick. On the other hand, this got out immediately, and sometimes calls from the town’s residents specifically request that it be anyone other than him who shows up to take care of their problems. That’s never happened until now.

Dale’s also not here for Harry to talk about it with, though, owing to that damn conference he’s at in DC, and there’s really not anyone else Harry would feel comfortable complaining to. At least, there’s not anyone here in Twin Peaks. He digs through some paperwork for a minute until he finds the number he’s looking for, then picks up the phone and dials with only a little bit of a nervous pause.

“Federal Bureau of Investigation, this is the office of Regional Chief Cole, may I ask who’s calling?”

“This is Sheriff Truman from Twin Peaks, is it possible I can speak with Gordon, please?”

“One moment.” He’s put on hold, but it doesn’t last for too long. “I’m transferring your call, Sheriff.”

“Thank you.”

Harry braces himself by holding the phone slightly away from his ear.

“GOOD MORNING, SHERIFF! I MUST SAY, I WASN’T EXPECTING A CALL FROM YOU! IS THERE TROUBLE OUT IN YOUR NECK OF THE WOODS AGAIN THAT I SHOULD KNOW ABOUT?”

“Morning, Chief!” Harry shouts back. “There’s not a huge problem or anything, I actually wanted to ask if you can help me get into contact with someone else! Coop’s not here right now or I would’ve just asked him!”

“OH, I SEE! AND WHO WOULD YOU LIKE TO SPEAK WITH?”

“Denise Bryson!”

“WHAT’S THAT, SHERIFF?”

“DENISE BRYSON!” Harry bellows into the phone receiver.

“WELL, SHE’S NOT PART OF MY OFFICE, SHE’S WITH THE DRUG ENFORCEMENT AGENCY, YOU KNOW! I CAN CERTAINLY TRY TO GET YOU IN TOUCH WITH HER BUT I MAKE NO PROMISES!”

“Thanks, I appreciate it!”

“ON A COMPLETELY UNRELATED NOTE, SHERIFF, MAY I PLEASE ASK YOU A PERSONAL QUESTION IF IT’S NOT TOO INVASIVE?”

Harry frowns. “Uh, sure!”

“ALBERT ROSENFIELD HAS BEEN SPREADING RUMORS AROUND THE OFFICE THAT COOP STAYED IN TWIN PEAKS BECAUSE THE TWO OF YOU ARE ROMANTICALLY INVOLVED! IS THAT TRUE?”

Good lord, does _everyone_ know about this?!

Harry clears his throat. “Well… yes, that’s part of the reason!”

“I SEE! WELL, AFTER WHAT HAPPENED TO HIM LAST TIME HE WAS SEEING SOMEBODY IT’S A GOOD THING FOR BOTH OF YOU THAT WINDOM EARLE’S NO LONGER IN THE PICTURE! IT SEEMS IMPORTANT FOR ME TO INFORM YOU NOW THAT ALBERT CAN APPARENTLY HEAR ME THROUGH THE WALL OF MY OFFICE! HE WANTS YOU TO KNOW THAT IF ALL GOES WELL AND THE TWO OF YOU DECIDE TO GET MARRIED LATER ON HE FULLY EXPECTS TO BE INVITED!”

Harry doesn’t have words for how horrified he is by this conversation. Apparently _everyone everywhere_ knew that this was a thing before he did, and he hates that.

“Tell Albert that Coop and I have been seeing each other for all of four days and he’ll be waiting awhile for anything like that!” Harry finally decides, a little spitefully. “Can I get Agent Bryson’s contact info, please!”

“OF COURSE, SHERIFF! PLEASE GIVE ME ONE MOMENT TO FIND THAT FOR YOU!”

Finally, thank god, Gordon gives him the number and they say their goodbyes. Harry rubs his face as he sets down the phone, then immediately picks it back up again and dials. Thankfully this time he doesn’t have to go through a secretary, because he’s not sure how he’d explain himself if he did.

Click. “Agent Bryson.”

“Hi, Denise. It’s Harry Truman.”

“Good morning, Sheriff, what can I do for you?”

“Do you have a minute? It’s not really a law enforcement issue…”

“Sure, I was just doing some busywork for a case I wrapped up last Thursday. You sound like something’s bothering you.”

“It is. Uh. Can I just ask - how did you… how did you come to terms with your… thing? I don’t know the right words you use, I’m sorry.” Harry’s tripping over his own voice, which he never does. He hates this. He hates that he has to call and ask someone else for advice. He’s way past old enough now that he shouldn’t have to do that.

“Well, it happened shortly after the case where I disguised myself as a transvestite. I was driving to my office and by random chance I saw a kid, he looked like he was about… oh, maybe sixteen or so. He was spray painting on a bridge, and as law enforcement I should’ve got out and stopped him, but I saw what he was writing: ‘It’s not my fault I love him.’ This was the same morning I planned to speak with my superiors about my transition and I took it as a sign in a way. It wasn’t that boy’s fault that he was gay, and it’s not my fault that I needed to transition. I never had any doubts after that that this was the right choice for me.” She pauses. “This wouldn’t have something to do with Dale, would it?”

“Jeez, you too?” Harry groans.

“Relax, Sheriff. I don’t know you that well, I only knew about this because Coop told me he had a thing for you over dinner in the hotel one night.”

Oh. That actually makes it a little better.

“But you didn’t know you were… like you are. Not until that case.”

“No. Looking back there were a few signs, but it was a pretty sudden realization for me. So now I have to ask, are you calling on his behalf or your own?”

“…mine.”

“I see. In the interest of you not having an identity crisis, and because Dale’s a good friend of mine, I’ll be glad to talk you through this. It’s a good thing you caught me right now since I’m not busy.”

“Thanks, Denise.”

“Don’t mention it. So are you seeing him?”

“I don’t know. Kinda. I’m not… really sure. It’s a little bit like how when you’re a kid and you go to the lake during the summer you kinda stand there because the water’s cold and you don’t really get past your ankles. That’s about what I’m doing right now.”

“It’s not unreasonable, I’m going to go out on a limb and guess you’ve only dated women up until now. Don’t beat yourself up too much for feeling nervous.”

Harry sighs through his nose. “It’s not a problem I ever expected to have.”

“Well, that’s because it’s not a problem,” she insists, still kindly. “It sounds to me so far that you should try not to think about it so much and just let it be what it’s going to be. How do you feel about him?”

“He was in the hospital for awhile after…” Should he talk about the Black Lodge? “For the first ten days he was just lying there. I’d go and stay until they kicked me out every night, the woman I was seeing before this, she… uh. She died. I thought he might die, too. Then he woke up again and he was just fine like it never happened, and I couldn’t even say anything for a little bit so I hugged him instead. I almost.” Should he say this? He might as well. It’s pretty unlikely he’ll see Denise in person again after this and he doesn’t think she’d tell anyone. “I almost cried. I thought he was gonna die.”

“He said you made friends right away.”

“Yeah, we did. I never met anyone like him before.”

“Well, Sheriff, like I said I don’t know you that well. But I do know Coop, and my advice stands: you should just let this be what it’s going to be. He’ll make you very happy if you let him. Jump all the way into this lake of yours.”

“The whole town’s talking already and we haven’t even done anything scandalous. Sometimes… people don’t want me to be the one who shows up when they call in with their problems.”

“I’m sorry to say it, Sheriff, but there’s not much you can do about that one. It’s just something you’ll have to get used to. But please don’t get it into your head that if you put distance between the two of you everything’ll go back to the status quo. It won’t, and you’ll just be hurting him and yourself for no reason.”

“Albert thinks we’ll get married,” Harry blurts out for some reason. “It’s been four days. So I’ve been getting every reaction there is from people to something I haven’t even done yet.”

“Albert Rosenfield?”

“Yeah.”

“You shouldn’t take him too seriously, he was probably just being a shit.”

Harry can’t help a chuckle. “Sounds about right.”

“Now, Sheriff, you should know that Dale’s very popular with federal law enforcement. So if you end up breaking his heart the entire FBI will be after you and you may wind up with a bounty on your head.”

Harry laughs. “I’ll keep it in mind, thanks.” He’s starting to feel a little better about this, finally. This was the right call.

A little more seriously, she continues: “He acts like he’s less vulnerable than he is, but he’s got a big heart. I don’t really get the impression from you that you’d ever hurt him on purpose, but still.”

“Yeah, I noticed that about him right away when he stopped me from getting in trouble after I clocked Albert in the morgue.”

Now, Denise laughs. “You did? I’ll have to ask him about that the next time I see him.”

“He figured out some way to… I care about what happens in my town, y’know? I care a lot. So I don’t think anyone would ever look at the way I do things and say I’m all that professional about my job. But he cares just as much and is still professional.”

“That’s a good way to put it. That’s what people usually fall in love with about him once they know him past being pretty… the first time he had to come to my office for something he was all the secretaries talked about with each other for more than a week straight, because he smiles compulsively at _everything._ ”

They both share a laughing fit - mostly because Harry can picture that, _of course_ that’s something that happens with Dale, and it ends up being contagious so that Denise laughs with him for a moment.

Eventually he gets a grip on himself again. “So… people? What people fall in love with him?”

“Usually witnesses. I’ve been on more than one case with him, girls go after him in packs. There was even one in the hotel when I was investigating him for the cocaine, she tried to kiss him when she was leaving his room.”

“Really? What girl?”

“Brown hair, blue eyes. She was a lot shorter than him.”

“Audrey Horne.”

“Well, anyway. It happens to him a lot. I don’t think he notices most of the time, he doesn’t seem like he knows how handsome he is.”

“Yeah. I don’t know what the hell he wants with me.”

“I asked him the same thing and he went on a tangent. There’s a lot of things about you that he loves.”

Harry comes to a realization and then it’s out of his mouth a second later before he can hold it back. “I think it’s cute how he does that.”

“See, there you go. Now - backing up a little, you said your last girlfriend passed away. How long ago was that?”

“He was there in the room with me when it happened.”

“I see. You probably have some issues leftover from that, and it might be a good idea for you to talk about it with him before it becomes a problem for the two of you.”

“We kinda already did.”

“Good! That’s important. A lot of the problems people have in relationships, or really in general, are because of miscommunication.”

Harry snorts. “I don’t think he’ll ever have trouble telling me what he wants.”

“Can you say the same thing about yourself?”

“…I don’t know.”

“Then you should probably figure that out sooner rather than later.”

“Yeah.”

“Alright, do you feel like you don’t have to be in the middle of a panic about your sexual orientation anymore?” she asks.

“It’s better now, yeah. You’re a big help.”

“I do my best… good luck, Sheriff. I hope the two of you get to be happy together.”

“Thanks, Denise.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I love Denise ^_^ I wish we got more of her in the show.


	6. Impaired And Unfixable

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Trigger warnings in endnotes.

“Harry?”

“Yeah.” Harry doesn’t move his eyes from the tv screen, trying to convince himself that he’s more interested in… whatever the hell they’re supposedly watching than the feeling of Dale’s fingers burrowing across his scalp.

“Your hair is much longer than I originally thought.”

“Yeah, well, that’s what happens when you’re all curly,” Harry mutters, a little resentfully. “I got it from my mother. Frank used to tease me for it all the time when we were kids.”

“If you hate it that much, why have you grown it out so far?” Dale questions.

“Because it hides how big my ears are. It’s like a car driving up the street with its doors open.”

“I like your hair.”

“Yeah, I noticed. You’re probably the only one  _ ever _ who’s liked my hair, Coop.” Harry shakes his head, dislodging Dale’s hand. “Y’know, I’m average-looking at best, especially now I’m getting up there in years like this. What the hell do people like you or Josie ever think they’re doing with me?”

Dale frowns. “Harry,” he says very seriously, “I would appreciate you not comparing me with Josie.”

“Sorry.”

“In my instance specifically the superficial has only ever been an insignificant percentage of why I’ve felt attraction towards another person.” His expression softens a little after that, though. “Given your extreme misfortune and lack of success in terms of romantic relationships so far, I don’t blame you for your lingering insecurities. Please trust me when I say you deserve so much more than you’ve gotten.”

“And now you wanna be the one who fixes all that.”

“If you’ll let me. I want you to be happy.”

“Well, I got some real bad news for you, Coop: I’m not fixable. You might as well just drop that whole idea right now.”

“Nobody can fix you but you, Harry,” Dale comments patiently. “But I’d like to help you figure out how to heal some of the things you believe are so horribly wrong with yourself. You’re in no way unlovable.”

This is terrifyingly similar to a conversation he had at the beginning of his relationship with Josie, where she sat down and convinced him of a whole bunch of reasons why she wanted him, him of all people, to be part of her life. Harry stands abruptly off the couch and goes into his kitchen. Normally he tries to hide this better from people, but Dale already knows everything that’s broken in him anyway so it doesn’t matter much if he stands at the counter and does four or five shots all at once.

A palm on his wrist. “Harry, what’s wrong?”

He grips the glass so hard that for a second he thinks it’ll break into a million pieces that’ll all go shooting right into his hand. “Everything.”

It’s the only right answer. Everything is wrong. Half the town wants to burn a tire around his neck and he’s had this conversation before. He can’t hear this again, not from Dale. He can’t have Dale stop being someone he trusts. He can’t stand there and watch Dale die in a hotel room. The whole world is full of things already that Harry can’t do, but those are at the top of the list.

The shot glass clearly isn’t going to break, but Harry will if he doesn’t have some whiskey in the next five seconds. He doesn’t remember anymore how long he’s been like this, it’s an old problem and it’s not going away. He hates that he is this way, that he has to be this way, but it’s also so soothing, when he finally just gives up and drinks every last one of his other problems start dropping away from him.

And now Dale’s hand is on his wrist, anchoring it there. That’s new. Nobody’s ever tried to stop him before… of course the problem didn’t used to be as bad as it is these days. And mostly he drinks when he’s alone anyway.

“Harry, I wish you would speak with me about this.”

Harry pulls his arm away finally, but he doesn’t yank or anything because that would be unnecessarily mean. He’s not mad at Dale. The person he hates the most will always be himself. That hate grows every time he pours a fresh shot, he could stop doing this at any time but somehow he never gets around to it. He has nobody to blame but himself.

“I can’t keep having this conversation.” Harry unscrews the cap on the bottle of Jack Daniels and tilts the opening down to the glass. “I already had this conversation, and it needs to not happen again.”

It’s been two weeks since they kissed in Dale’s kitchen and already everything’s going wrong. He knocks back the double of whiskey and starts fixing himself an identical double to follow it up with.

“Harry, are you aware that you’re currently experiencing a panic attack?” Dale asks quietly.

He drinks his second helping of liquor and realizes the question was directed at him. “What?”

“From the context of the situation, I can ascertain that something I said upset you… you’re having a panic attack. Have you always experienced feelings like this, or is it a recent development?”

Harry deliberately doesn’t look at Dale. He can’t answer that, because he doesn’t know. Sometimes it feels like he doesn’t know anything anymore. So he just shakes his head. He shakes his head, and he refuses to look at his… boyfriend… and he feels the burn of the whiskey in his stomach. Already that’s comforting and it hasn’t even sunk in yet, but it’s a familiar feeling, relief will come to him soon.

Dale pulls him slowly into a hug. Harry lets it happen. It can’t make things worse, after all. Hugs are nice.

“Harry,” Dale whispers, “please talk to me.”

“Give me ten minutes. After that maybe I can.”

Long enough for it to start taking effect. After that he can accept things a little more. He’ll be able to be more okay with being something other than what he always thought he was, with the fact that  _ Dale Cooper _ is his  _ boyfriend. _ Usually only women have boyfriends, but now he has one, too. He’ll be a little less upset about this whole thing.

He’s led back to the living room and they sit on the couch again. This time, Dale’s in the corner and he pulls Harry over to lean into him, ear to his sternum through his shirt. Harry can feel his heart beating under the soft flannel. That distracts him a little, listening to Dale’s heart.

“Has anyone ever noticed that you have anxiety before now?”

Harry shakes his head. “No.”

“That stands to reason. This appears to be a recent development.”

Harry sinks a little against Dale’s chest. “You knew I’m like this… you picked me anyway.”

“Yes, I did. This isn’t who you are as a person. It’s a psychological issue.” He feels Dale take a deep breath. “Harry, does this have anything to do with Josie?”

“Yeah.”

“You feel exploited and betrayed by someone you loved.”

“Yeah.”

“I’m not here to play games with you or your emotions. You have every right to feel exploited and betrayed after what happened with Josie, and I won’t try to invalidate that. But I also don’t believe that you’re a hopeless case. You can learn to grow beyond that, to not let it define you as a man.”

“Dale.”

“Yes?”

“Stop tryn’a fix me.”

“Seeing you in this state hurts me on a deep emotional level.”

“Then stop looking.”

“Harry-”

“Josie had no good reason to be with me. She told me this… this big long list of things, but I was something like a security object for her. If she was seeing me the rest of the town wouldn’t get suspicious.”

“I know.”

“I had a couple other girlfriends before that. They were all real pretty like she was, too. I don’t know what the hell they saw in me that they wanted, but I guess they didn’t get it, and they never stayed long.” Harry stops for a second. His thoughts are a little fuzzy around the edges. “There’s people who’d be better for you than I am.”

“Do you always think that way or is this the result of a panicked and impaired mental state?”

“I don’t know. Maybe I think that a little sometimes…”

“Harry, there are people I’ve attempted to foster romantic relationships with before who ultimately grew to find me insufferable. I’ve been asked on more than one occasion why the hell I can’t ever shut up.” Dale starts slowly petting down his hair. “I had panic attacks for some time after what happened with Caroline. You’ve had an overwhelming response of fear or anger to something an untrained observer would consider innocuous. It’s not your fault. You’ve suffered through a traumatic event and it left an imprint on your mind. I can safely gather that you’ve had issues with alcohol prior to that as well, and the two now feed into each other.”

“I should stop drinking so much. I just haven’t gotten around to it yet.”

“Well, you’ll need professional help for that, Harry. The majority of alcoholics are unable to recover on their own through sheer force of will.”

“You mean AA.”

“Yes. That or therapy.”

Harry laughs bitterly. “That means my choices are that quack Jacoby or an entire room full of people who know who I am and will vote me out of my position.”

“Perhaps you should speak to Albert.”

“What the hell good will that do me?”

“He was suspended and nearly fired when they caught him drinking in his office several years ago. He’s been in exactly the point you’re at before and may be able to offer some insight as to how he overcame that.” Dale pauses. “And incidentally, I like your ears, too.”

“Really?”

“Yes, Harry. The only things about you I don’t like are all the things I love instead.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Trigger warnings:  
> 1\. Here in this chapter we see one of Harry's panic attacks, which subsequently drives him to drink.  
> 2\. Harry expresses some amount of self-loathing without understanding why he feels that way.  
> 3\. Cooper talks about how he himself used to suffer panic attacks after Caroline's murder.


	7. Running Circles

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Trigger warnings in endnotes.

Harry sips his coffee and glares at the newspaper on his desk. He already knew people can pay to have whatever they want put into the  _ Gazette, _ as evidenced by the chess deals Dale kept having to publish during the Windom Earle debacle. He also already knew that people can be assholes sometimes for no good reason. Those two things in combination currently mean that someone had one of those “opinion” articles in there saying that he shouldn’t be reelected into his position because… well, they don’t actually give a concrete reason. Maybe the paper just refused to print the word “faggot” or something and that’s why the reason isn’t given.

It’s not on the front page or anything. Actually it’s buried towards the back. That doesn’t make it any less horrible.

Hawk comes in, sets down his donut, grabs the paper off Harry’s desk, crumples it loudly into a ball, and throws it over his shoulder so that it flies out into the hallway. “The whole station’s already seen it.”

“Yeah. So’s the rest of the town. It’ll mean all those people who call and deliberately ask for not-me to come help them will realize they’re not the only ones, and this’ll gain traction.” Harry shakes his head. “How long until I start getting bricks thrown through my windows at home, you think?” he wonders bitterly.

“You think anyone would really be dumb enough to vandalize the house of a police officer?” Hawk says.

“Yes,” Harry answers dryly.

“If you show up to work hungover tomorrow just because of a damn newspaper article, Harry, I’m gonna call your boyfriend and make him slap some sense into you,” Hawk threatens.

Harry grins a little despite himself. “Gee, Hawk, normally you’re up to slapping sense into me all on your own. Getting lazy in your old age, huh?”

“Maybe a little,” Hawk shrugs. “I don’t see Cooper as the slapping type anyway, he’d probably end up babying you instead and I’ll be the one doing all the slapping like always.”

“Well, he flew out to New Mexico for a case last night, so he’s not here even if he was the slapping type.” Harry stands up from his chair and stretches a little. “I’m willing to bet you didn’t come in just to hassle me about that.”

“Nope.”

“Well, who’s around for me to send? It’s pretty clear by now I can’t just go myself-”

“Catherine Martell. She asked for you specifically.” Hawk clearly feels suspicious about what the reason for that might be, and Harry doesn’t blame him. “Whatever she says to you, ignore it. You know how she is.”

Harry nods. “Sure do.”

“Good luck, Harry.”

“Thanks.” He’s probably gonna need it.

Harry dreads speaking with Catherine and it only gets worse as he drives. He’d seen her sneakily side-eyeing him many times over the years, even back when he was a kid, like there was something wrong with his face that should’ve been fixed, and he just knows this is going to turn into a confrontation. Whatever flimsy pretext she’d given to Lucy when she called asking for him and him specifically will have absolutely nothing to do with the conversation they’re about to have and he can’t convince himself otherwise.

Pulling up to the Blue Pine Lodge, he has a whole bunch of feelings that don’t match - he hasn’t been here since Pete died, and he’s sad for that, and also for Josie even though he’s also angry at Josie for lying to him and for shooting Dale. There are good memories here, but they’re all tainted by the fact that she’d been playing him the whole time, using him as a shield. And she tried to kill his then-best friend. Harry will never forgive her for that.

He takes several deep breaths before even turning off his engine, then steels himself and goes to knock on the door. It doesn’t take long to open.

“Good morning, Sheriff. I suppose I should say not for long, given what the paper has to say about you these days.”

“Catherine I hope you didn’t call me here during work hours just to scold me for something that’s none of your damn business,” Harry growls, already fed up with this.

“Why don’t you come in for a minute.”

He has no idea what possesses him to take her up on that, but he walks after her into the house, taking off his hat as he does.

“What did you call for?” he asks, putting on his best don’t-bullshit-me demeanor.

“Oh, I thought I heard a noise outside the window earlier, but it turned out to be nothing. Coffee?”

“Alright.”

She pours a mug and hands it to him.

“I suppose you’re undeterred by the current public opinion.”

“Catherine-”

“Honestly, Harry, I don’t know who you thought you were fooling with Josie. A blind person could see clearly that you’ve had strong feelings for that young man since the start.”

“Catherine, I’m supposed to be working right now,” Harry says for the second time.

“I suppose you’re still hoping to be reelected this year.”

“Nobody else is running.”

“We could see about your brother coming back. The pressure of the job seems to have been eating you since Laura Palmer died, perhaps you should take some time off to take care of yourself, get all your… problems in order.”

“Problems?” he demands. How much does she know?

“Well, there have been rumblings around town that you go to the Cash & Carry at late hours and leave with small brown paper bags… one wonders about things like that, you know.”

Oh, perfect. First Josie, then Dale, now his crippling alcoholism. She’s just pulling out all the stops today. And on top of this suggesting that Frank should come back because he’d do a better job than Harry… the worst part of that one is knowing she’s almost definitely right. Frank sure as hell did a better job back then than Harry’s doing now and Harry can’t possibly deny it.

“Catherine, I’m gonna just point out again that nothing you’re saying to me is any of your business. My personal problems, my relationships, my family situation - none of that has anything to do with how well or in what manner I choose to do my job. I’m doing my best, I’ve always done my best. You know that and so does the rest of the town.”

“Of course I know that, dear. But your best has been slipping the last few months and it seems like you may need to recuperate for awhile. Perhaps you should try to take care of yourself first and not worry so much about an entire town full of people.”

Harry wants to throw something at her. He doesn’t, though.

“I’m going back to work now, Catherine. I’ll be going back to work every day for the foreseeable future. Have a nice day.”

Harry leaves without finishing or even starting the mug of coffee she gave him and speeds back to the station without wearing his seatbelt or putting the lights on. When he gets back and goes into his office, he has to resist an overwhelming urge to put his fist through one of the windows.

* * *

It’s the fifth day - it feels like the fifth month. This is the first case Dale got sent on since he moved to Twin Peaks and already Harry’s going crazy without him.

It’s kind of amazing, in a horrible way. He never knew he could miss a person so much who isn’t even dead. And this is despite the fact that Dale calls him every night so far, religiously at 9:05 pm. Harry misses him. He thought he’d be okay with this, they haven’t been together that long and when you really boil it down they haven’t even  _ known _ each other for a significant amount of time. Harry thought he could be okay with this.

It’s not helped at all by how the town’s behaving right now. First was the thing where nobody wants him answering their calls, then the paper. After that article got printed people have started openly glaring at him in the street. He pretends not to notice, he pretends it doesn’t drive him to drink (like he needed an excuse to do that anyway).

“What can we get you tonight, Sheriff?”

Shelly still smiles at him while taking his order as he sits alone in a booth at the back of the diner. She’s so nice. Harry has no idea how she’s with someone as rotten as Bobby Briggs.

“I saw on your specials you have rabbit stew?”

“Okay, what would you like to go with that?”

“Coffee and a side-salad, please.”

“Coming right up.”

“Thanks, Shelly.”

She pauses for a second, not taking his order to the kitchen right away. “You look really unhappy, Sheriff. I hope you’re not listening to those idiots in the  _ Gazette. _ ”

“No, it’s not that,” he lies.

“Agent Cooper’s out of town.”

“Yeah, he’s working a case somewhere down in New Mexico right now.”

“I heard some people had bets going about how long it would be until you two started seeing each other.”

“Yeah, all my deputies and even Lucy had a big pool going. Apparently my private life is worth two hundred and twelve dollars,” Harry says, finding a chuckle.

Shelly giggles back at him in reply. “I’d think it’d be worth more than that… your food’ll be up in a few minutes.”

“Thanks, Shelly.”

Harry sits and people-watches while he waits for his supper. Bobby comes in and orders something, then kisses Shelly over the counter while paying for it. Margaret sits with her Log in another empty booth, the corner furthest away from Harry, sticking a wad of pitch gum under the table. Toad, like always, is stuffing his face with mashed potatoes that are drowning in ketchup. Ed is with Nadine, picking at his meal and seeming like he’s trying his damnedest not to look as miserable as he feels while Norma occasionally glances at him longingly from behind the counter. Small people with their small lives and small trappings.

Harry wonders how many of them agreed with that newspaper article, how many of them will try to vote him out of his position next month, how many of them now look at him either thinking  _ faggot _ or muttering it under their breath to each other, how many are desperately hoping (more than they already did) that Frank will come back and be sheriff again instead of him. How many, if any at all, will stand with him if it comes down to it.

Harry looks in his wallet - two twenties and four ones. Good. Good. He’ll go to the Cash & Carry after he’s done eating. He’s pretty sure he still has some at home but making sure can’t hurt…

It won’t get out of his head. The texture, the flavor, the aftertaste, the burn of it in his gut. He needs a drink. Or two. Or eight. There’s no point trying to resist, even though just thinking that feels disgusting. He doesn’t want to be like this. Most normal people aren’t like this, they don’t have to put away half a bottle of Jack Daniels just so they can sleep at night. But there’s no point in trying to stop it. He always caves in the end. Sometimes it’s right away. Sometimes, it’s not until three thirty in the morning, when he has to wake up in two and a half hours to get ready for work. Yesterday he accidentally showed up at the station still drunk, but thank god nobody said anything about it. Maybe they just didn’t notice, somehow.

He could stop this if he really wanted to.

And he should, he knows he should. He just hasn’t gotten around to it yet. Besides, he’s not as bad off as some other people. He doesn’t drink in his office. He can make it through a work day without any liquor to help him with it. That’s a line he hasn’t crossed, and he never will. He should stop altogether. He just hasn’t yet. It’s not as bad as it could be.

Rabbit stew, coffee, side salad. Harry digs in with thoughts of whiskey still running in circles around his head.

He should stop.

Really, he should.

But he misses Dale.

The whole town hates his guts.

He hasn’t gotten around to it yet. He’ll stop once those things have been solved.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Trigger warnings:  
> 1\. Use of the f-slur at points in the chapter because Harry is thinking that word directed towards himself.  
> 2\. Overt homophobia directed at Harry in a newspaper article.  
> 3\. Harry expresses a fear/expectation of being hate-crimed.  
> 4\. Catherine Martell says some very vile things to Harry that are dressed up in nice polite words.  
> 5\. Harry's temper nearly gets the better of him and he operates his vehicle in a somewhat-reckless manner.  
> 6\. Mentions of semi-overt homophobia being directed at Harry in public settings.  
> 7\. Harry's alcoholism escalates slightly.


	8. It's Not Nothing

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Trigger warnings in endnotes.

The phone in his office rings. That by itself is just weird, because usually the calls go through Lucy first, but this one doesn’t. Harry finishes swallowing his fistful of aspirin and picks it up. “Sheriff Truman.”

“Harry, you wanna explain to me why the fuck three people have called my station now asking me to drive back up and take over for you?”

“Frank?”

“Who else.”

“Right… I didn’t think they’d be that fucking bold about it. Shows what I know, huh?”

“So? What the hell’s going on over there, first of all, and second should I be worried about it?”

“Twin Peaks suddenly hates me.”

“Okay…?”

“Frank, nobody’s been happy since you left anyway. Now they’ve gone from ‘unhappy’ to ‘incredibly fucking pissed off.’” Harry normally doesn’t talk to people like this, but it’s his brother and also his head really needs to just hurry up and explode so that it’ll stop pounding and carrying on like it’s doing. “Nobody else is even running and they’ll still find a way to vote me out of office this year…”

“Well, tough shit, I ain’t coming back, and that’s exactly what I told them when they called. Now c’mon, what’s up over there?”

Harry takes a deep breath. “They’re upset over some things I did.”

“Which are?”

“I’m… well, for starters, the town found out about Josie and that didn’t go over well by itself. There’s been rumors going around lately about me being a drunk, too.”

“Well are you?”

“It’s under control,” Harry lies. “But neither of those things are what put a bee in everyone’s bonnets over here.”

“Then what?” Frank demands, exasperated.

“I’m… in a relationship they like even less than the one I had with Josie.”

“Why? You having an affair with someone’s wife?”

“No, not even close. You know I’d never do that…”

“I didn’t think you would until now!”

“Remember how the FBI got involved in the Palmer case a couple months ago?”

“Yeah, Ed called me up and told me all about it.”

“Well… Frank, you need to promise you won’t reach through the phone and strangle me for what I’m about to say.”

“I can’t do that. Spill.”

Harry sighs. “It’s the agent they sent to investigate. I’m with him.”

Silence. Harry starts to sweat and he tenses up when he hears a throat-clearing from the other end.

“That ain’t a good reason for you to get kicked outta your spot, Har.”

Not the response he was expecting. “Apparently however-many-thousand people don’t agree with you.”

“Harry…” A sigh. “I’m not gonna say anything about what I think of you boning another guy. I could, but I won’t. What I will say is probably the same thing you always tell them, which is it’s none of their fucking business and they should get on with their lives. Next time someone calls begging me to come back, I’m gonna say that exact same thing to them, too. That help any?”

Harry smiles despite himself (and the pain in his skull). “Yeah. Thanks, Frank.”

“Good.”

They hang up and Harry does actually feel slightly better about things. He wasn’t expecting this phone call, for one thing, but more than that he also wasn’t expecting Frank to be even remotely okay with this. That’s a pleasant surprise and he hangs onto the feeling for a moment. Sometimes it’s nice remembering that even though Frank’s been tough about certain things in the past, Harry’s still his baby brother and will be looked out for accordingly despite them both being in their forties.

And then Lucy starts talking: “Sheriff, I have a call for you on line two.”

“Thank you, Lucy.” Harry picks up his phone again, rubbing his throbbing forehead. “Sheriff Truman.”

“It’s me, Harry.”

“Dale? It’s nine thirty in the morning, aren’t you working?”

“Well… not anymore.” Dale sounds like he’s stuffed up… is he coming down with something?

“What? What do you mean, ‘not anymore?’”

“I’m coming back.”

“That quick? It’s been eight days.”

“Will it be possible for you to pick me up from the airport? It’ll likely be between midnight and one.”

“But you drove there.”

“Yes I did.” A brief pause. “Harry, I have a concussion and I’m currently unable to work. I won’t be capable of safely operating a motor vehicle for several days.”

“What happened?” Harry demands, louder than he meant to.

“A suspect we were…” There’s a long moment of silence. “Sorry. I had to vomit.”

“Coop please say you’re not calling me from an emergency room.”

“I’m not, I left the emergency room last night and I’m at the hotel. In any case, there was a suspect we were chasing and he got the jump on me inside a building. I took a severe blow from a steel crowbar and it’s very lucky I’m not injured worse than I am. Albert called Gordon and tattled on me, and now here we are.”

“Okay, Coop, I’ll come get you. It’s the airport here and not Seattle, right?”

“Correct.”

“Good. Anything else I should know?”

“Nothing immediately concerning.”

“I wish you’d stop getting hurt, Dale.”

“It’s never by choice, Harry, or else I’d be happy to honor your request.”

Harry nods. “Okay… I’ll see you soon, I guess.”

“Around midnight.”

“Yeah. I’ll run up there with Hawk and he’ll drive your car back for you.”

* * *

Harry gets really angry the second he finds Dale at the airport. “You said there was nothing else! This isn’t _nothing,_ Cooper!”

Dale gives him a helpless look. “I didn’t want you to worry.”

His nose is broken. His god damn nose is _broken._ He said there was nothing else and that he didn’t want Harry to worry… well, now Harry’s just upset instead.

“How hard did you get hit?” he demands, grabbing all of his boyfriend’s luggage.

“The suspect with the weapon bludgeoned me with sufficient force to knock me backwards onto the concrete, where I subsequently hit the back of my skull at a high velocity. I was unconscious for approximately ten seconds. According to the emergency room physician I require another doctor’s appointment as soon as possible, especially if the nausea and vomiting don’t subside. I have a terrible headache and, as you immediately noticed, my nose is broken. It was manually reset and will heal normally if not tampered with. Tylenol is the only acceptable painkiller.”

Dale almost falls sideways as he’s talking, which means Harry dropping everything to catch him. He decides immediately that he can be angry about this later and right now he should just be concerned.

“Anything else?”

“I need to wake up every two hours.”

“Oh… you can stay over with me, I’ll wake you up,” Harry offers, grabbing Dale’s stuff again.

“That won’t be necessary, I have an alarm clock.”

Well that’s… weird. “Yeah, but you’re hurt, maybe you shouldn’t be by yourself right now.”

Harry remembers football - back then it was called “getting your bell rung,” taking a big hit to the head and staggering around or falling constantly. Sometimes you’d end up puking like Dale’s been doing, too, or you’d forget small stupid things like where your shoes went. Frank had a couple, Ed had a bunch. The record-holder on Harry’s line was always Hank, who could barely go two games without getting his ass knocked out.

Harry only had one… it was the first and the last one, because it was worse than Dale’s is right now and he woke up in the hospital with people shining lights in his eyes. Thank god it was right at the end of the season anyway, because his mom actually stopped him from playing after that. He stayed mad at her over it for awhile, he’d wanted to play in college but she pulled him. But seeing Dale now, in this state, Harry really understands why she flipped out about it. It’s scary to look at.

“I’ll be alright at home, Harry. You don’t have to go through all that trouble.”

Okay, now he gets to be angry again. “Coop. You can’t walk in a straight line and you’ve got two black eyes on either side of a busted nose. You’re coming to my place, I’m gonna wake you up every two hours, and tomorrow the first thing you’re doing after you’ve had your coffee is going to see Doc Hayward.”

“I have a right to bodily autonomy, Harry-”

“No,” he snaps. “You gave that up when you downplayed how hurt you are over the phone. Dammit, Dale, you wanted to be with me so bad in the first place. That means me taking care of you instead of letting you do something stupid like go home by yourself and then falling and cracking your head or something with nobody around to help.”

Dale smiles at him, but it’s pained, somehow having nothing to do with being injured. “Okay, Harry.”

He nods. “Good. Hawk dropped off your car at your house already, so we can just go.”

“How? My keys are in my pocket.”

“Because you keep a key for your kitchen door under a rock and you keep an extra car key in the drawer under your coffee maker. He said he put both of them back exactly where they were, too, so there’s no need for you to get all compulsive… his words, by the way, not mine.”

“Are they?”

“Yeah, I think your compulsions are cute,” Harry blurts out. He immediately feels himself turning red.

Dale grins even though he’s also frantically grabbing onto Harry’s arm to keep his balance at the same time. “Thank you, Harry. I don’t think there’s a single person on the planet who would agree with you, but I’m flattered nonetheless. You have no reason to feel embarrassed by saying so, either.”

Harry sighs. “Let’s go home, Coop.”

He loads the luggage and Dale into his truck. Getting in himself, Harry realizes that he’s not going to sleep tonight and also that he won’t be able to drink, either. He has to stay awake until morning to look after his boyfriend.

“Harry, you should know I’m not a particularly sound sleeper,” Dale says, very randomly and with a weird note of warning in his tone.

“That’s okay, I’ll be up all night anyway so it doesn’t really matter.”

“No, it’s not…” He seems frustrated, and that makes the situation even stranger. Dale’s never frustrated. “I don’t sleep well, Harry. I often wake up at inconvenient times and I may startle you unintentionally. It’s a consequence of my entry into the Black Lodge, prior to that I only rarely had trouble sleeping. Now it’s inconsistent and irritating.”

“That’s okay, Coop,” Harry says again.

When they get home, Harry forces Dale to sit down and do nothing while he digs through a suitcase for pajamas instead. He finds them balled up at the bottom, along with two bottles of pills and an inhaler.

“I was asthmatic when I was younger,” Dale supplies.

“Are you still?”

“Harry, do you recall the morning two days after I came to in the hospital when there were nurses everywhere and they refused you entry?”

“Yeah…”

“It’s made a resurgence. That’s a rescue inhaler for any potential random instances where I might suddenly begin to asphyxiate.”

“Okay. And these? Are they for asthma too?”

Harry reads the labels: **WELLBUTRIN (AMFEBUTAMONE) 150mg** and then **MINIPRESS (PRAZOSIN) 20mg**. He’s never heard of either of these things and Dale is very deliberately not looking at him anymore.

“I’d rather not talk about those right now, Harry.”

“…okay.” Harry doesn’t know what to think of that. “Uh. I didn’t think you’d be so bad at packing a suitcase.”

“Oh, I didn’t pack, Albert did it for me. He was extremely inattentive and I got upset with him for it, but he didn’t care and sent me to the airport without apologizing.”

“He’s such a bastard.”

“He certainly can be at times,” Dale agrees.

Harry leaves to go make himself some coffee, which also gives Dale privacy in order to change clothes. What he really wants is his nightly dose of booze, but that’s not happening right now. Dale needs him to be present, so present is what he’s going to be. With a full steaming mug, he goes back into his bedroom and discovers Dale lying down in the side that Harry already doesn’t sleep on, which is kinda perfect. He wonders if it’s coincidental or deliberate.

“What are you doing, Harry?”

“Getting in bed…”

“But you’re going to stay awake.”

“I can do both,” Harry insists, taking a long sip of coffee while he’s still sitting up. “Besides, I can’t sleep in jeans and a belt, Coop.”

“I wasn’t expecting…” He trails off and lies back with his hands folded on his chest.

“Dale, I’m not gonna try to pull anything on you, okay? You’re hurt and besides that I wouldn’t even know where to start. And I thought you said you liked to get cuddled.”

“Oh. I did mention that as I recall. Yes, I enjoy being cuddled.”

“Well, then by all means get over here.”

Dale chuckles. “If you insist, Harry.”

“I do insist, dammit,” he teases, gently pulling Dale across the mattress and into his arms.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Trigger warnings:  
> 1\. Cooper suffers a concussion secondary to blunt force trauma breaking his nose, which he's partially dishonest about with Harry.  
> 2\. There are mentions of Cooper vomiting as a symptom of his injury.  
> 3\. There is a mention of Harry suffering a severe concussion in the past while playing football.  
> 4\. There is a mention of Cooper suffering a severe asthma attack in the hospital, which Harry wasn't present for and so was not aware of.  
> 5\. Harry finds two prescription bottles in Cooper's suitcase, which Cooper refuses to explain.
> 
> Wellbutrin was amfebutamone back in 1989. That didn't get changed to bupropion until sometime later (early 2000s?).


	9. Safety

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Trigger warnings in endnotes.

It takes two weeks for the bruising under Dale’s eyes to go away. He’s still not allowed to go back to work because some of the symptoms haven’t disappeared yet - sometimes he still feels dizzy and grabs onto Harry when they’re walking somewhere and he also gets headaches, especially if it’s too bright outside. His nose is technically still broken but it looks fine and it’s not going to heal crooked or anything. He won’t stop being unfairly handsome anytime soon.

Unfortunately, being in town and not out on a case means Dale has learned not only about the newspaper incident but also about how people have been begging Frank to come back and replace Harry. Unsurprisingly, he’s not impressed by this turn of events.

“It’s troubling,” Dale gripes right before taking a dose of Tylenol and washing it down with coffee that’s probably not decaf despite the time being almost ten at night.

“There’s nothing I can do,” Harry grumbles. “If they vote me out, they vote me out. I don’t know who the hell they think is gonna replace me since nobody else is even running, but… nope. Nothing I can do, Coop.”

“Ignoring the fact that I know this is a ridiculous and stupid question even prior to asking it, have you tried reasoning with any of them?”

“How the hell am I gonna reason with an entire town, Dale? They’re not interested, they don’t wanna hear it. Having some god damn queer as one of the leaders of the community is just unacceptable for them.”

“Harry, I sincerely wish you wouldn’t refer to yourself with such abrasive language. It gives a very strong impression that you don’t like who you are as a person.”

“Coop, I got news for you: I _don’t_ like who I am as a person.”

Dale slowly comes over and sits beside him on the couch. He has a really nice couch, actually, it’s soft in all the right spots and Harry’s a little jealous of it sometimes. A hand slips into his own.

“I’m going to neglect to mention the healing process of bones because it’s too blunt of a comparison for the situation at hand. Instead, I’d like to expound on a random fact I once learned - in Japan, there are specific objects… I don’t recall which objects but I believe it’s china or some other type of dinnerware. In any case, when it becomes cracked or broken, it’s not simply thrown away and replaced like it would be here. Instead, repairs are made in gold, and this gives the item an exquisite and unique pattern that could never be replicated otherwise. The object is still useful and now is even prettier than before, when it was flawless.”

Harry doesn’t get any of this. “Okay.”

Dale squeezes his hand. “Harry, broken things can still be beautiful if you let them. This principle can also be applied to people. At some point the two of us, together, will find all your cracks and start filling them in with gold instead. And it should be noted also that I would never throw you away.”

He has no idea what to say to that, so he just sits there, letting Dale hug him and kiss his forehead before getting back up and bringing him his own mug of coffee. They settle together in a corner of the couch with Dale leaning into the spot between his arm and his flank. Harry tries not to think too much about this, about how if anyone looked in the living room window and saw them there’d be bricks sailing through that same window less than a minute later.

Instead, he pays attention to small pointless things. Harry likes the way Dale smells, subtle and expensive. Expensive deodorant, expensive shaving cream and aftershave. He uses different brands of laundry soap and fabric softener than Harry. His hair has some product in it, but damned if Harry knows what it is exactly. Even that smells nice. None of these things are even detectable unless Harry’s within two or three feet of his boyfriend.

Harry sits still and drinks his coffee, pretending to watch tv when actually he’s feeling Dale fall asleep tucked under his arm. Dale’s been so tired the last few days, but whenever Harry asks he just smiles in a way that seems really sad and dishonest before saying he hasn’t been sleeping well. He doesn’t ever explain, he doesn’t let Harry ask questions. It’s worrying.

Actually, thinking about this, Harry feels upset in a weird way, like he’s chronically disturbed by the fact that Dale has been lying to him. Dale never used to lie to him, especially not so easily and so often. And he doesn’t understand what changed. Why are people only honest with him until he’s dating them? What is it about being in a relationship with Harry that makes someone have a sudden and irresistible need to be untruthful?

Josie lied to him, so many times and about so many things that he actually can’t even remember anymore a single word she ever said to him which was truthful. Now Dale lies to him, too. Maybe not as often, but it’s telling when a man who can be so blunt and overwhelming with facts and evidence then becomes compulsively dishonest overnight. What’s so wrong with Harry that this has to be a pattern? Why does he deserve to be lied to so often by people he’s stupid enough to care about?

His thoughts focus sharply on Dale. Harry’s got so many personal problems, maybe, that Dale thinks he’s too fragile for the truth. Or maybe something about Harry scares Dale and he can’t admit it because he didn’t notice it was there until they were already seeing each other. Maybe Harry just doesn’t deserve to have people not lie right to his face every other word. He did something to earn this.

He’s gone from that train of thought to working out a way he can get off the couch without disturbing Dale so he can go home when Dale wakes up screaming.

It’s kind of horrifying… no, it’s _definitely_ horrifying to be startled violently out from the quiet of his thoughts by this stabbing noise, and after that stops Dale grabs onto him and clings like a child. Harry doesn’t have a god damn clue how to handle this and just hugs back, not as tightly but still in the most secure way he knows how.

“Don’t make me go back to sleep,” Dale begs, trembling and sweating in his arms.

“I won’t,” Harry promises, starting to rock him a little. “I won’t make you do anything you don’t wanna do.”

Dale buries his face in Harry’s flannel like he thinks pretending he’s not crying will make all of this magically fix itself somehow, like whatever the hell this is can just dissolve and never come back if he hides his tears long enough. It doesn’t actually work that way, though. Harry stands them slowly off the couch and pulls him into the bathroom, then runs the sink so that the water gets cool (not cold) so he can wash his face. Dale seems like he’s going to try to do that but then buckles, grabbing onto the edges of the sink with his forehead falling into the mirror. It doesn’t crack, thank god, but that’s the least of anyone’s problems right now. A bark… no, actually, it’s something else, a noise that’s angry and humiliated and scared out of his wits. He sounds like a hurt animal.

“I’m sorry,” Dale sobs. “I’m sorry…”

“Why?” Harry whispers, putting a hand on his back.

Dale’s head shakes against the glass. “I don’t know. But I am.”

“Coop…”

“I can’t talk about this. Don’t make me talk about this.”

“No, I won’t,” he says for the second time. “Dale… what… what can I do? How can I make this better?”

“I’ll have to get back to you on that.” He pries himself back from the mirror and collects some of the water running from the tap, then rubs it across his face. “Do you recall if there’s any coffee left in the kitchen?”

“I can make you some if there isn’t.”

They end up sitting outside on Dale’s porch, shoulder to shoulder under a blanket and hands wrapped around steaming mugs of fresh coffee. Harry sips his, watches the stars, and waits for Dale to tell him what the hell just happened. It’s not really working though because Dale’s being uncharacteristically quiet.

“Can I ask something, Coop?”

“Alright.”

“Why don’t you like having photographs in your house?”

Dale hesitates before answering. “Windom Earle and Jean Renault accessed information on the intimate details of my personal life in order to use them against me,” he says quietly. “Having physical evidence in my home as to the identities of people I care for seems like an unnecessary liability.”

“But both of them are dead.”

“Yes… there could be someone else in the future with similar intentions. It’s not a risk I’m willing to take. Harry, you may find this insulting, seeing how you’re more than capable of taking care of yourself. But the idea even of keeping a picture of you in my wallet is frightening for me. I’m not selfish enough to toy with your life and safety over a pointless sentimentality.”

“You don’t feel safe.”

“No,” Dale whispers. “I haven’t ever since Caroline was murdered.”

Harry takes a deep breath. “Dale, what are all those meds for?”

“Allegedly they’re to treat the lingering psychological problems after I returned from the Black Lodge. There are horrors there which I couldn’t accurately describe for you, Harry, and they left me with specific and very difficult psychiatric pathologies. In theory, they were prescribed in order to limit my anxiety and possibly reduce the incidences of bad dreams and night terrors. It’s been several weeks and I’ve noticed no improvement.”

“So this…” Harry moves his hand vaguely. “…happens all the time?”

“Most nights. Usually more than once. I’m sorry, Harry, but this is the reason I was so hesitant to stay over with you on my return home after being concussed. I had no desire for you to witness me in this state.”

He doesn’t say anything for a minute. Eventually he swallows. “Do you want me to go?”

“No.” It’s automatic. “I feel safer when you’re with me.”

“Okay,” Harry whispers, putting an arm around his shoulders to pull him closer.

* * *

Harry wakes up to a bunch of circumstances that are out of the ordinary and one circumstance that’s generally still pretty ordinary despite how old he’s getting. Firstly, he’s in Dale’s bed. (Thankfully it’s Saturday and he doesn’t have to go to work.) Secondly, he’s in his underwear and a t-shirt instead of pajamas or sweats. Thirdly, in addition to being in Dale’s bed, Harry’s also spooned against Dale’s back, face in his boyfriend’s neck. Fourthly, this is the first time in… he doesn’t even remember how long now that he’s woken up without a crippling hangover. And then - something he’s a lot more familiar with. It doesn’t happen as often as it used to, but it does still happen sometimes. Good thing Dale’s still-

“Good morning, Harry.”

…asleep.

“Morning,” he mumbles back.

Maybe they can joke about it and pretend it’s not awkward. Last night when Dale was trying desperately hard to stay awake as long as possible, they’d gotten to talking about sex somehow and he’d very thoroughly described to Harry how exactly this is a thing when both of them are men. Thinking about that just makes things worse and Harry reaches down to reposition his cock so that he’s not poking Dale anymore. A tiny voice in the back of his head whispers to him that he shouldn’t be turned on by Dale, that he’s crossing some kind of line he can’t step back over again. All of that gets pushed out of his head when his boyfriend deliberately shuffles backwards to press against him even more tightly. Harry takes a short, sharp breath inward.

“Harry.”

“…yeah.”

Fingers around his wrist, pulling his hand over to feel - Dale’s hard, too.

“Given a recent topic of discussion from last night you seem to be in need of practical instruction.”

Of course Dale words it like that. Harry grins into his messy black hair and kisses the spot where his head meets his neck. “Just say you want me to have sex with you, Coop. It’s less words.”

“Harry I want you to have sex with me,” Dale announces boldly.

Harry laughs. “You’re not good at innuendo, are you?”

“I prefer to get to the point without unnecessary time-wasting. I’d also like to point out I said exactly what you told me to say.” Dale sticks out an arm and rummages the drawer in his bedstand for a second. “Which size of condoms do you wear?”

“There’s more than one size?”

“Yes, there are. Judging by your response probably the ordinary and most common size, then,” Dale says.

It’s funny and cute, but also a little irritating. He’s being so businesslike about the whole thing. So, to put a stop to that, Harry squeezes him a little and then bites the side of his neck. Dale tenses up immediately and whines. He’s a little skinnier than Harry, yes, but they’re almost identical in height and there’s nothing soft about his body to be found. He feels like he’s stronger and sturdier than he looks and he’s not comparable at all to the women Harry’s slept with in the past… Harry never expected to be aroused by any of that. Shows what he knows.

“You wanna just stay like this?” Harry murmurs against his skin, pulling aside the collar of his pajama shirt and kissing down to his shoulder.

“Yes, this should be fine,” Dale gasps. He clumsily feels around in the drawer some more and pulls a couple things out of it. “Here.”

A condom and a packet of lube are pressed into Harry’s palm. He thinks he’d be a lot more nervous and weird about this if Dale wasn’t facing away from him right now. As it stands, they’re both still not completely awake yet because they haven’t had any coffee and that makes them too lazy and impatient to actually get undressed. Harry pulls down the front of his underwear to free his cock and then shoves back Dale’s pajamas just far enough that they’re not in the way. He rolls on the condom and slathers the lube over top of it, and as he slowly slips his cock into Dale the room is filled with the sounds of them panting.

Harry’s arms wrap around his boyfriend’s chest, not to squeeze so much as to just keep Dale still. He can feel all kinds of muscles tensing up to answer his movements; one of Dale’s hands is gripping tight to Harry’s forearm and the other is tangling a fistful of bedding. Every last one of the noises he makes sounds strangled.

“Am I hurting you?”

“No,” Dale promises, and he sounds like he’s telling the truth again finally. “Harry, you don- _ughn,_ ” he grunts, interrupting himself. “Aim for precisely that spot going forward.”

“Okay,” Harry breathes into the back of his head.

Dale makes some kind of ragged pleasure-noise when Harry does the same thing again. “Don’t have to be so careful, Harry… done this before…”

He can’t even make complete sentences now, apparently. It’s so god damn satisfying. Harry slams into him a lot harder and gets him to shout without words this time. They’re a tiny bit clumsy, they’re not fully awake, they haven’t learned yet all the best ways to make each other’s nerves sing. But it’s still kind of perfect. Harry can feel all of Dale’s breaths and each sound his boyfriend makes is just as much a vibration against his chest as it is a noise in his ears.

It doesn’t last anywhere near as long as Harry thinks it probably should… they both come more or less at the same time, but it’s completely by accident. Because Harry’s way too worked up over this already even though it’s only been about three minutes and he’s doing everything he can not to short of actually stopping, but then Dale starts to come and _god_ he can _feel it_ and once that happens he can’t hold back anymore… but it also stops mattering anyway by this point.

Harry only moves just enough to remove the condom and once that’s taken care of they both lie there for a long time, completely still and feeling each other breathe. Women have usually found it weird that Harry actually likes to stay cuddled up for awhile after sex, but Dale doesn’t seem to mind at all and that makes him ridiculously happy. He kind of loves that, how Dale’s never surprised or confused by anything he does.

“Harry,” Dale says finally, startling him a little - he almost thought his boyfriend was about to fall back asleep.

“Yeah.”

“I don’t mean to seem greedy for your attention, but would you care to join me for breakfast this morning at the diner?”

Harry chuckles. He can’t make the ideas of “greedy” and “Dale Cooper” exist in the same context, but he also finds this new iteration of his boyfriend’s quirkiness adorable like always.

“Coop, it’s my day off. You can have as much of my attention as you want,” he promises. “I’m gonna have to go home first and put on clean clothes, though.”

“That’s fine.”

About an hour later they walk into the Double R together. Harry feels more aware of the eyes on him than usual - they know. They all know. How can they know? It drives him crazy. Isn’t anything in his life private anymore? He was happy just a few minutes ago and now he’s on the verge of losing his shit. They know. Everyone knows. He just got done having sex with another man and it’s apparently written all over his face or something because they _know._

Harry ends up ordering whatever Dale’s having because the menu isn’t in English anymore. Or maybe it is and he’s just stupid. The words can’t find their way into his brain. He has a headache - right, he didn’t have any whiskey yesterday. God, he needs some whiskey right now. That would fix everything, even just one shot of it. His headache gets worse. He doesn’t feel good. Something’s wrong but Harry has no idea what it is. Something’s wrong with him. He needs some whiskey. Everyone’s looking at him, he knows they are even though he’s not looking back at them. They know. They all know what he did.

Why does it have to be so noisy in here? It’s pressing against his ears, there’s too many sounds. A plate of food and a mug of coffee are set in front of him. Harry’s arms are starting to feel funny and it takes three tries for him to pick up his fork. There’s too much noise. He’s trying to eat but it’s too loud in here, he has a headache. His arms feel funny. A sip of coffee. He’d rather be having Jack Daniels instead. That would fix this. The whole situation would go away immediately if he could just have one drink right now. The lights are way too bright, everything is too colorful. It’s like the entire world is trying to hurt him, to make his life miserable, to not let him just eat his damn breakfast.

But even the food is wrong, it’s only making him feel worse. Every bite, every sip - Harry gets sicker and sicker. His arms are really starting to go numb. He can’t keep holding his fork. Oh, god, he’s going to throw up all over the table.

“’Scuze me,” Harry mumbles to Dale, standing up way too fast.

He’s dizzy and his head hurts. He tries not to actually run for the bathroom because then people would just stare at him even more. His sweat is soaking through his undershirt, isn’t deodorant supposed to stop that from happening? Fuck, fuck, his head. It hurts. He can’t feel his arms. Harry drops to his knees in front of the toilet and starts heaving. He was just in time. Fuck.

Harry sits on the floor for awhile after. His head spins every time he moves, so the floor seems like a good place to be. This way he won’t have very far to go if he falls over. His arms are still numb and his headache hasn’t gone away. His whole body is shaking and he can’t make it stop. Maybe he got poisoned somehow. What’s wrong with him? Well, everything, as long as he’s being honest with himself. Everything’s wrong with him. And he can’t come out of the bathroom, not like this, not while he’s still sick. People will stare at him. But what if someone else needs to come in? Harry trapped himself in here.

He stands up again, very slowly. His ass was starting to go numb from sitting on the linoleum. He washes his hands and runs the sink so that he can rinse out his mouth. When he goes to unlock the door, he stops again. There’s people out there. They’ll all be watching him. They all know that everything’s wrong with him. He drops his hand back to his side and stands there, frozen. His head still hurts. His arms tingle. He’s dizzy. He knows the lights out there will still be too bright and maybe it’ll just send him running back in here to be sick again. He might as well stay put. This is the safest place for Harry to be, right now.

A knock on the door. Harry jumps out of his skin.

“Yeah?”

“Harry, are you alright?” comes Dale’s voice.

Oh, thank god, it’s just his boyfriend. It’s not somebody else who will stare at him.

“Yeah. I just. I got sick. That’s all.”

“Oh… well… I paid for the food already. We can leave.”

Harry feels himself shaking a little. “How many - Coop, how many people are out there?”

“Most of the booths are empty. Shelly is tidying up. Donna is sitting at the counter and speaking with her while she makes rounds gathering dishes. Big Ed is sitting by himself in the far corner drinking coffee. Norma is also tidying, but the counter instead of the booths. I’m standing here speaking with you,” Dale reports. Somehow he says all this making it sound like the most normal thing in the world for him to be talking to Harry through the bathroom door.

The most important thing is that there’s almost nobody out there to witness Harry’s walk of shame. He finally opens the door again and leaves the diner with Dale, and he can’t feel anyone watching him now. He sits in Dale’s car and rubs his face.

“Harry, what happened?” Dale asks, very quietly, from the other seat.

“I don’t know.” He can’t describe it, how it feels, because it’s finally going away and he doesn’t want to think about it. “I just felt sick all of a sudden.”

“Harry…” Dale stops and then sighs. “You haven’t consumed any alcohol recently, have you?”

“No, I stayed over with you last night. Usually that’s when all my drinking happens.”

“Alright. That’s an extremely bad sign.”

“Yeah.”

“But not for the reason you likely think it is. You’re having withdrawals.”

“Okay, so bring me home and-”

“No. I’m taking you to see Doctor Hayward. Your current health condition could become extremely dangerous and may potentially kill you.” Dale finally turns the engine. He’s starting to look angry at himself. “I failed to anticipate this. I should’ve sent you home last night instead.”

“Coop, what the hell are you going on about?”

“You’re very likely to spend the next week in intensive care. The two solutions available are for me to bring you home and allow you to return to the habitual poisoning of yourself, or I can force you to seek medical treatment that’s long overdue. I’m opting for the latter.”

“No. Dale. No. Just take me home.”

“Harry-”

“Coop I’m not going to the hospital. Take me home.”

“But Harry-”

“No,” he insists. “I can’t spend a week in the god damn hospital. I have to work.”

“Harry-”

“Please don’t make me jump out of your car while it’s moving.”

Dale brings him home.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Trigger warnings:  
> 1\. Harry sarcastically directs a slur at himself during a conversation with Cooper and shortly following expresses some amount of self-loathing.  
> 2\. Cooper suffers night terrors and a minor panic attack, and ultimately admits that the night terrors and anxiety are what the psychiatric medications were prescribed for (but that they also don't seem to be working).  
> 3\. There is some semi-graphic sexual content.  
> 4\. Harry suffers the beginning effects of alcohol withdrawal and combined with his lingering internalized homophobia is catapulted into a severe panic attack in a public establishment - he goes into the bathroom to vomit and continues to hide there afterwards until Cooper retrieves him.  
> 5\. Cooper attempts to force Harry to seek medical attention for his alcoholism but fails.
> 
> When Harry tells Cooper that he doesn't like himself and who he is as a person, this is mostly because he's not able to separate out who he is as a person from all the problems he has in his life. He can't differentiate that alcoholism and internalized homophobia are not, in fact, personality traits.
> 
> I'm not actually sure if lube came in packets in 1989? Google couldn't give me a definitive answer on that one but it's a lot more convenient than fucking around with a bottle or a squeeze-tube.
> 
> So writing this particular panic attack sequence almost gave me one - it's based very heavily on several that I've experienced, which means I had to think back and remember all kinds of horrible moments in order to write this scene correctly. I had to keep stopping and walking away from my laptop. The only difference is I've never had puking as a symptom during any of mine.


	10. Accountability

“Okay.” Harry resists the urge to rub his forehead for a tenth time in five minutes. He needs some aspirin. “There’s a tree down travelling southbound on highway 2, Sanderson and Kappler, you two can go there and help keep traffic from getting worse. Forester, I’m sending you to…” He checks the paper. “17 Spring Street, apparently Mr. Mueller’s dog got hit by a car and he swears up and down it was done on purpose, see if you can’t get that sorted out. Hawk, Margaret called asking for you, she said there’s poachers out near where she lives shooting deer out of season. Brennan, Gallagher, Wierzbowski, do a follow-up on that brawl at the Roadhouse from last night. I want your paperwork in by lunch if you can help it. That’s it.”

They all leave the conference room. Harry goes into his office and digs a bottle of painkillers out of his desk, then swallows probably too many of them with a big gulp of coffee. Dale sits in one of the chairs in front of his desk, still reading the thing he brought in with him before Harry did roll call in the conference room.

“What is that?” Harry asks.

“I wrote to the next town over to inquire about something and they responded much more quickly than I was expecting.”

“About what?”

Dale folds the paper and tucks it into his shirt pocket, then gets up and closes the door before sitting back down.

“Taking into account a concern you previously voiced, I asked them if they have their own chapter of Alcoholics Anonymous there and they said that they do. You wouldn’t have to do it here where everyone knows you and would further ostracize you for it.” Dale folds his hands in his lap. “Harry, I hope you can understand that this isn’t specifically a choice you make for yourself. It’s much closer to an injury or a disease. It’s extremely unlikely that you’d be able to stop on your own and to expect such an outcome is impractical at best. But it doesn’t have to be permanent. There are steps we can take to correct this problem. If you like, whenever I’m home and not out working a case, I’ll go and do it with you.”

“It’s not that bad. I don’t drink at work or anything.”

“Harry, this weekend you went without for less than twenty four hours and began experiencing withdrawal symptoms. That’s extremely dangerous for you and it means from a medical standpoint you’re incapable of recovering without help,” Dale explains in a gentle but serious voice. “It should be possible to plot out a course of action for you. With the amount that you drink, especially considering the frequency with which you do it, you will have to be hospitalized for approximately three to seven days to mitigate the risk of death from alcohol withdrawal syndrome. They’ll take care of you there and it’s guaranteed to be a safe environment that facilitates the start of the recovery process. They may prescribe medications for you to take for some amount of time afterwards, and you’ll begin going to meetings. I also maintain you should call Albert and speak with him about this. He’ll be able to explain to you what you can expect from this process.”

“Coop… I told you, I can’t just spend a week in the hospital. The town’s already trying to get rid of me. I have to be at work, and I have to be accountable.” Harry shakes his head. “I know you want to help. But this is really just not something I can deal with right now.”

Dale has a terrible look on his face like he wants to cry but is forcing himself not to. “Okay, Harry.” And like he’s only agreeing because he has no other choice besides.

“Nothing that’s wrong with me is your fault.”

“I know.”

“It’s not your job to fix me.”

“I want you to feel better, that’s all.”

Harry shakes his head and sits behind his desk. “Coop, if me being unhappy with my life makes you so unhappy with yours then maybe we shouldn’t be seeing each other,” he says without thinking very hard about it first.

“Not being with you would make me more unhappy.”

Really, Harry can see where he’s coming from on that, though. As mad as he feels sometimes that Dale keeps not telling him the truth or only giving him part of the story, it is nice having someone in his life that he got to be friends with before they were together. Harry already liked Dale so much before this. So in that small way, Harry’s happy, too. He’s glad that he gets to have Dale.


	11. Outside Help

The election is happening three weeks from now.

Harry doesn’t talk about that with Dale over the phone. His boyfriend finally got the okay to work again and was called for a case _the exact same day_ because fate or god or whoever clearly just wants Harry to go insane. So now it’s back to late-night phone calls while Dale is in Utah. Harry doesn’t talk about anything that’s bothering him. He asks about Dale’s case, how was Dale’s day, only things about Dale. He wants to hear everything about what his boyfriend is doing. He needs to think about something else besides the fact that in three weeks he won’t have a job anymore.

After they’ve hung up for the night, the phone rings again while Harry is pouring himself a double. He knocks it back and picks the phone receiver back up.

“Sheriff Truman.”

“How much have you drank already? It’d be better for everyone involved if this could be a coherent discussion.”

“ _Albert?_ What the hell do you want?”

“You’re putting your boyfriend through the wringer and it’s affecting his ability to work, Truman.”

“I’m not talking about this with you, it’s none of your damn business.”

“Alright, if you’re going to act like a spoiled toddler, then maybe I should tell you a bedtime story: I’ve been in exactly your position and it very nearly cost me my life. Gordon caught me drinking in my office and I was rightfully suspended for it immediately. I don’t recall the specifics of how I came to be in the situation, but I do remember very clearly that shortly after he reamed me out for being drunk I was getting pulled out of my car and cuffed because I wrapped it around a telephone pole.”

“Well…” Harry doesn’t know how to continue that sentence.

“Would you like to know how the story ends?”

Harry rolls his eyes. “Go ahead.”

“I was promptly stuffed into the back of the arresting officer’s car and subsequently driven home… Cooper read me the riot act, uncuffed me, and demanded that I get my shit together. I’m not entirely sure how he took care of the vehicle I totaled but I never heard about it again. That could very well have been the end of my career if he wasn’t such a good friend, or the end of my life if a billion tiny factors hadn’t coincided to only give me whiplash and a headache instead. Don’t even think about interrupting me to say what I know you’re thinking. No, you don’t drink in your office or drive home plastered… yet. But you will. Eventually it’s going to hit that point and you probably won’t be as god damn lucky as I was that Cooper was following me home. You’ll turn up in the morgue with a broken neck and the lives of everyone around you will be upended at best and destroyed at worst.”

“Albert, he keeps trying to send me to the hospital! I don’t have time to give up just for that!”

“I did the hospital detox during my suspension. You, presumably, can just take some vacation time. They’re going to put you on a bunch of psychiatric meds for a couple months and you’re going to do therapy.”

“Coop keeps talking about AA-”

“No, don’t bother with that, they’re a fucking cult and they’re not nearly as helpful as everyone claims they are. You, Sheriff Truman, are going to sit in an office once a week and bitch and moan about your problems to that loon with the overly-colorful glasses. You’re going to stay the hell away from booze. You’re going to fucking let Cooper fuss over you already before he goes crazy… and every time the urge to drink gets too strong, you’re going to call me. Any hour of the day or night, at work or not. And then I’ll talk you through it.”

“Albert-”

“Stop trying to interrupt me.”

“All I wanted was to ask if Dale put you up to this.”

“No, he didn’t. My hotel room is located immediately next to his and after his damn night terrors woke me up for the third time at quarter to four this morning I spoke with him about it. He told me that he feels safer and has them less when he’s with you, and if you’re what he needs to be okay then we can’t really have you up and dying on us now can we? Let me ask you, how many times has he screamed and woke you up since you first started seeing him?”

“I don’t know, maybe twice? It was two different nights, though.”

“I’ve shared a wall with him for five nights on this case. It’s happened _nineteen times_ to me so far. I’m seriously beginning to consider involuntarily dosing him with Propofol just so I can get some sleep.”

“Albert, he’s suffering. That’s not funny,” Harry snaps.

“You’re both suffering, Truman. Whatever he saw in that place fucked him up in ways I never thought possible and you have a chronic illness. Cooper doesn’t have a bad bone in his body and neither do you, so your lives should get to be fixed before either of these things gets too much further. I personally demand that you two be happy together, god dammit, and if that doesn’t happen there’s going to be words.”

Harry snorts despite himself. “I thought you’re a pacifist.”

“I am. That doesn’t in any way prohibit me from inundating you with harsh sounds. You should know that by now. In any case, the fact remains that as much as you two dumbasses love each other you can’t fix any of the problems you have on your own. Bearing that in mind, I’m providing you outside help and it’s even free of charge. Try to take advantage of that.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> AA is a fucking cult. I will not be argued with on this point. My boyfriend did it and he said it was the most ass-backwards, unhelpful thing he ever tried. They are a cult. They do not fix addiction. There are better and more helpful services out there which don't rely on instilling a fear of the wrath of god to "fix" you.
> 
> Oh also you guys are gonna hate me for what happens in Friday's update. Brace yourselves.


	12. Bad Choices All Around

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> *cringes away into a corner* Please don't hit me...!
> 
> (Also, I had a heat injury today, so this chapter is going up a few hours early because that way I can just go to bed.) ...he says, before not actually going to bed.
> 
> Trigger warnings in endnotes.

Harry figures out that his relationship is in trouble when he picks up his boyfriend from the airport and is relieved. He’s relieved that Dale didn’t lie to him again, that this really was just the end of the case and Dale isn’t hurt.

When did Dale stop being someone Harry can trust?

Dale wouldn’t tell him about the nightmares. Dale wouldn’t explain the medications. Dale didn’t tell him how bad he was hurt before coming home early from a case. Dale keeps trying to put him in the hospital even knowing for damn sure that’s not what he wants. Dale talks about him to Albert even though it’s none of Albert’s business.

Harry helps Dale carry his stuff inside and then stands in the kitchen, thinking.

“You’re upset with me,” Dale guesses.

“Coop, we need to talk.” Never mind that it’s nine thirty at night.

“Alright.”

They go sit on the couch.

“Why did you start lying to me after we started seeing each other? You never did that when we were just friends. But now you leave stuff out, or you’re just flat-out dishonest like when you broke your nose. Now I gotta go around wondering if the things you say to me are even true, and that’s not fair. I can’t be in a relationship like that. I know you hate when I say this, but Josie did a lot of those same things. She was always lying to me left and right about _everything._ So you wanna explain to me, please, why I don’t deserve to get the truth from you?”

“It’s a very complicated issue,” Dale starts quietly. “With my mental health in its current state… Harry, I never intended to be habitually dishonest with you. There are so many unfamiliar factors that I have to consider now which were never present before the Lodge, and I had no desire to inflict them on you.”

This comes into his ears and immediately translates into _I’m sorry, Harry, I was just trying to keep you out of this._

He’s already had this conversation.

How many conversations that he had with Josie will he have to have again with Dale?

No more after this one.

He can’t do that again.

“I can’t do this again.”

He can’t finish this conversation, he can’t. He can’t. All of it’s wrong. He never expected this from Dale. Harry needs to get out of here, he’ll crawl out of his skin if he doesn’t. It feels like the air is crushing him.

“Harry-”

“No.” For once it’s him holding up a hand to stop Dale from talking. “I already - Coop - I. No. I can’t do this again.” Apparently he also can’t talk, either. “I’m sorry. Excuse me.”

Harry gets up and leaves.

He does double the speed limit going back to his house, not wearing his seatbelt. Why is his life like this? Why doesn’t he deserve for anything to go right? What is it about him that brings out the worst and most rotten parts of people? Dale has said, over and over again, how much he loves Harry. Harry thought this would be different… but something’s wrong with him, and because something’s wrong with him it broke Dale, too. Maybe it’s not something, just one thing. It can’t be just one thing. It must be a whole bunch of things. Everything. Everything is wrong with Harry, and so Harry is what’s wrong with Dale.

He almost hits his own mailbox as his truck barrels into the driveway. Harry feels like he’s suffocating even though he can still breathe, he can’t hear anything around him. He kicks the door shut behind him and heads right for his liquor, not even bothering with a shot glass and just taking as long of a gulp as he can stand straight from the bottle.

Harry stands there, breathes, thinks. What did he just do, exactly? Is this the end of it? He drinks some more, and then some more again after that. Harry doesn’t know anything for sure anymore. Probably he should’ve… should he have waited? Should he have let Dale finish talking? No. Another swig of whiskey. Dale would say what Josie said. Dale’s stopped being someone he can trust.

God, that hurts.

Harry wants to still trust Dale. He wants to not be what’s wrong with Dale, what’s wrong with everything around him. Dale’s not okay and it’s Harry’s fault. It hurts to think about this and he fucking hates himself.

His stomach is too full of liquor, he’ll have to come back for the rest of the bottle later… and he still fucking hates himself. He hates that he is this way and that he’s always the problem with everything. It all traces back to him. He’s the reason Dale’s hurt inside. Harry maybe never deserved to have Dale in the first place, he’s never been good enough.

He’s not mad at Dale. The person he hates the most is himself, always himself.

Harry turns to face the counter again and opens a cabinet. Glasses. They’re meant for water but he’s drank whiskey out of them before. They have to go. He pulls them all out and pegs them at the floor just for the satisfaction of watching them shatter. It feels so good that he has to keep doing it, so he goes through his whole kitchen and throws every piece of ceramic dinnerware he owns at the floor. Once he finally runs out of things to smash the linoleum is so covered by white shards that he can’t even see it anymore. He crunches back across all this in his boots to get the whiskey.

Harry sits on his couch and just keeps drinking for awhile. He doesn’t want to think anymore.

* * *

Harry wakes up on the floor of his bedroom.

His alarm clock is going off, pounding screwdrivers and other hard metal things into his skull with every beep. There isn’t a single part of his body that functions, everything’s stiff and sore and in pain. He’s still in his boots and his work clothes, even his pistol belt… and there’s an empty bottle of Jack Daniels in his fist.

Harry squirms around on the floor for a bit, half-assedly taking everything off down to his boxer-briefs. The next thing he does is crawl into the bathroom and throw up in the tub because that’s closer. Usually he can make it all the way to the toilet, but he drank even more than usual last night… the first bottle was already half-empty when he got to it, so then he went for a second one. He was so drunk he couldn’t even walk and right now he still can’t, at least not yet. Hopefully that goes away soon. He has to work today.

At least everything rinses down the drain pretty easily. No matter how much he wants to, Harry doesn’t let himself stay in the shower for more than a few minutes and then he’s staggering around getting dressed. He doesn’t actually have time to shave but that’s not really important… clean clothes, deodorant. He needs to not smell like he bathed in whiskey. It’s unprofessional.

Harry brushes his teeth twice. Breakfast will wait until he’s at the station, and he doesn’t have any plates to eat off of anyway. He drags himself out to his truck and drives to work.

For once, Harry doesn’t drink any coffee. Just looking at the pot makes him too sad. Caffeine withdrawal, hangover… Harry’s kinda starting to wish he can just drop dead so that his head won’t keep hurting so bad.

This was a bad decision. This was a bad, bad choice. Everything he did last night was wrong. Harry should’ve tried harder to keep a level head, to try and figure things out instead of having a fucking mental breakdown. He should’ve sat and let Dale finish explaining. Harry can’t remember the last time he acted so stupidly. Why is he this way? Why can’t he do anything right anymore?

Harry does roll call, but he can’t hear himself saying anything while doing it. His mind is anywhere else right now, hitting on small random things sometimes but usually bouncing back and forth between Dale and the election - it’s happening on Friday. On Monday next week he won’t have a job anymore. And him losing his job is almost entirely because of the boyfriend he also no longer has. Harry feels like there’s a hole in his stomach when that thought comes to him.

There’s a bunch of things he could do, now that he’s back in his office and everyone else but Lucy has left to go out and do actual work. He could go home and get some sleep, since his time in this place is running short and it doesn’t matter anyway. He could go find Dale and apologize. He could just _call_ Dale and apologize, actually. Or… or he could…

There’s whiskey in his office.

It’s not really for him, it’s for guests like Judge Sternwood or sometimes Mayor Milford. It’s not for him. But his head is killing him and it doesn’t matter anymore. He’ll just do it this one time, a small sip, because he has a headache. Nobody’s around to see.

Harry reaches into the bottom drawer of his desk and pulls out the bottle as silently as possible. Unscrews it. A small sip, the tiniest he can manage and still count for something. And then it’s screwed up and put back again. No harm done. Nobody will ever know.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Trigger warnings:  
> 1\. Harry suffers a panic attack when trying to work out a problem in his relationship with Cooper. This causes his alcoholism to further escalate.


	13. Eventual Truths

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Trigger warnings in endnotes.

“Sheriff?”

Harry scrambles to stuff the bottle back into his desk. He’s pathetic and weak and drinks in his office now. She doesn’t need to know that. It doesn’t matter anymore, anyway.

“Yeah, Lucy.”

“Are you busy?”

“Not really, why?”

“Because somebody’s here to see you, it’s important.”

Harry sighs before pressing down the button again. “Send them in.”

That’s a huge mistake - it’s Dale, who he hasn’t seen or spoken to since Monday night last week. Today’s the day he’s going to hear that the town voted him out of office even though there’s nobody to replace him and this is all he needs right now.

“Harry.”

“Hey, Coop.” Harry can’t even look at Dale. He’s too ashamed of himself.

Dale comes in the rest of the way and closes the door, then sits.

Softly: “Harry, if you’ll permit me to do so, I’d like a chance to explain myself.”

God, Harry can’t do this right now… but he also couldn’t do it a week ago, either, so now’s as good a time as any, really. He’ll never actually be able to do it and he should just get it over with because he’s already miserable anyway.

“Go ahead.”

“I believe the difficulty arose because I worded my thoughts in a manner that agitated you and caused you to have a panic attack. Harry… your relationship with Josie has traumatized you. Specific things remind you of that trauma and send you into a spiral. I’ll make my best effort going forward to avoid inciting episodes for you.”

“Coop-”

The hand goes up. “Please let me finish, Harry… I will concede that you made an extremely valid point during our previous conversation. The situation has continually pressured me to act in unproductive and irrational ways. My mental health is in an extremely poor state as a direct result of my actions regarding the Black Lodge. You’ve also been struggling with many difficult issues that tend to feed into each other on a loop. I’ve been told in the past that my abnormal and eccentric behavior can become burdensome for other people, and my intention was to not exacerbate your problems by keeping mine to myself. It inexplicably failed to occur to me that this would only cause you further pain, and I’m very sorry for that. I never meant to…” He swallows and looks at the floor as his voice starts to waver. “Harry, I’m so sorry.”

And there, at last, is the truth.

“I’m sorry, too,” Harry whispers.

“For what?”

Everything… but he doesn’t say that.

“A bunch of stuff. I stopped trusting you and I walked out instead of trying to figure this shit out - that wasn’t fair at all. And kinda the same thing you said, too, my problems have turned into your problems.”

“I wish you weren’t subjected to all this suffering, Harry. Albert at times has referred to me as a ‘compulsive fixer’ and I would sleep easier at night if only there was something I could do that would stop your life from being so difficult.”

His phone rings, interrupting them. Harry sighs.

“Hold that thought for me, Coop.” He scoops up the receiver. “Sheriff Truman.”

The words coming from the other end are like he stuck a fork in an outlet and for a moment Harry forgets to breathe. They hang up before he does and it takes him more than twenty seconds to remember that he should actually put down the phone.

“Harry?”

Oh, yeah. Dale’s here, too. “Huh?”

“What was it?”

Harry takes a breath. “The town voted on a bunch of things on Friday, and one of them was me… fifty seven percent of them decided they want me to still hold this office… I get to keep my job.”

After he finishes talking, he’s somehow on the other side of his desk getting hugged by Dale. He’s not sure how he actually got here because he doesn’t remember moving his legs, but he’s squeezing back as tight as he can while he cries and laughs both at the same time. Dale’s murmuring something in his left ear but he can’t hear it; it sounds nice, at least. And this is the first time he’s been held in a week after he got used to having it happen all the time… it feels so good just for Dale to touch him. He missed it so much. Then Dale kisses the spot beside his ear and he’s not even laughing anymore, now he’s just crying and that’s it. He’s never cried from being happy before and it’s really confusing. He’s keeping his job and he gets to have Dale again.

* * *

The Tuesday paper is kind of a mixed bag of things.

After roll call, Harry sits in his office with Hawk and Dale so the three of them can pick through it. Harry’s not on the front page, thank god, because that spot is taken by Catherine Martell finally giving up on the Ghostwood development. The entire article talks about her husband getting blown up at the bank and Ben Horne’s joyful reaction to there not being a golf course next to his hotel.

“Hawk, when’s the last time you saw anything in the _Gazette_ that wasn’t tabloid bullshit?” Harry complains, shaking his head at what he’s reading.

“Cooper’s chess deals.”

“Good answer,” Dale chuckles, sipping his coffee and following it up with a huge bite of jelly donut.

Harry flips to page two and yup, there it is, a big long thing talking about him. He sets down his copy and starts rubbing his temples.

“Would you like me to give you the highlights of the article?” his boyfriend offers.

“Yeah, go for it.”

A couple minutes of silence follow as they all chew their pastries and Harry takes a handful of painkillers. Finally there’s a quiet, exasperated sigh from Dale.

“Alright. This newspaper article talking about you is actually talking about me most of the time for starters. It questions such things as whether you’ve been secretly gay the entire time and just haven’t told anyone until now and then attempts to stir up panic by suggesting one or both of us may be HIV-positive, which I have to say I resent. Sensationalist fearmongering at its most unsubtle. There’s very little in here relating to your profession.”

“Where the hell would they get the idea that you have AIDS?” Harry demands, outraged on Dale’s behalf.

“I’m not completely sure, I’m extremely careful and always ensure that I have condoms on my person prior to sexual encounters.”

“Maybe you should give them an interview, then,” Hawk says sarcastically.

“This is god damn ridiculous,” Harry gripes. “I’ve been in law enforcement from the second I got out of college and _this_ is all they’re interested in.”

“Don’t look at page three, then,” Hawk warns.

“Why not?”

“There’s one of those ‘opinion’ articles again that does nothing but talk about you being a drunk.”

Harry bangs both fists down on his desk, startling Dale, who’d been reading again. He forgets all about the paper for a second as his boyfriend falls out of the chair and then scrambles backwards to stand against the wall.

“Coop?”

Dale’s eyes find Harry and he visibly relaxes, letting out a breath. “Sorry.” He sits back down and picks up his paper again like nothing happened, but he looks a little pale.

“Are you okay?”

“Yes, Harry, I’m fine.”

“Dale, you’re lying again.”

“Oh. Yes, I am, aren’t I?”

Hawk gives both of them a baffled look. “You want me to leave you alone for this?”

“Dr. Jacoby is going to change my medications soon, I’ve managed to convince him the ones I’m currently taking don’t produce a significant positive effect.”

Harry nods. “Better.”

“He says I exhibit some symptoms of post-traumatic stress, but not enough for a formal diagnosis,” Dale admits. He looks up from his paper. “Actually, Hawk, at some point I’d like to have a discussion with you about the Black Lodge and the events that transpired while I was inside it, I believe you’d be able to offer some insight regarding my current mental state.”

“I’m free this weekend.”

“Thank you.”

Harry doesn’t look at the opinion article on page three and instead looks at a different opinion article which is _also_ about him, but this one seems to be defending him for once. It also brings up Dale, talking calmly and rationally about the two of them working to bring justice and closure on the Laura Palmer case and proposing that neither of them have done anything besides try to help Twin Peaks. That makes him feel a little better.

“Harry, I’d like to suggest you refrain from reading the paper for a little while,” Dale says finally, folding up his copy and setting it aside.

“That’s probably not a bad idea,” Hawk agrees.

“Yeah.” Harry rubs his face and then pushes his hand over his hair. “How long until people lose interest, you think?”

“Maybe a few weeks,” Hawk shrugs. “Ben Horne will probably do something to end up in the paper again and then everyone’ll forget all about you and Cooper being together.”

“Thank god for the absurdity of Benjamin Horne,” Dale remarks. “I don’t appreciate libel and character assassination directed at me or the people I care about like this. Fortunately, he’s very far removed from that category and the paper can print as many terrible headlines about him as they like as far as I’m concerned.”

Hawk and Harry both stare at Dale - they’ve never heard him say anything so spiteful and mean before.

“Jeez Louise, Coop, tell us how you really feel,” Harry says after a few moments of quiet.

“Harry, can you keep a secret?”

“…sure?”

“I absolutely loathe and despise Ben Horne for a list of reasons that I won’t get into at this time. However, rest assured it’s quite comprehensive. He’s a terrible human being and if I never interact with him or even see him ever again, it’ll be too soon.”

“Don’t worry, Cooper, nobody else likes him either,” Hawk informs him. “And that’s about how Harry feels about Catherine Martell, so don’t think he doesn’t get it.”

“Hawk, my office isn’t soundproofed,” Harry growls. He doesn’t need that getting out and turning his existence into an even bigger, louder scandal than it already is right now.

“Nobody’s out there except Lucy,” Hawk shrugs.

“Even so.” There’s more than that, but Harry doesn’t say it because he’s distracted by his stomach hurting again. It’s been doing that a lot since last week and he’s been throwing up more than usual while hungover in the mornings. “Dammit,” he grumbles, opening a drawer and rummaging until he finds the bottle of Tums.

“Heartburn?” Hawk guesses.

“Yeah, something like that.”

“Is this a recent development for you, Harry?” Dale asks in a voice that’s way more concerned than it needs to be.

“Yeah, why?”

“You may want to consider seeing Doctor Hayward about it.”

“I’m fine, Coop.”

“Harry you may have an ulcer.”

“No, if I did I’d be puking blood,” Harry argues. His dad had this same problem as he has now. Harry remembers his father puking blood that one time and it turned out he had an ulcer or something. The doctor told him to stop drinking but he never did. Eventually his liver quit on him and he died… but Harry’s nowhere near that point yet. Besides, his dad was a _way_ worse alcoholic than he is.

* * *

The only up-side to this is that Harry knows Dale isn’t one of those guys who likes to say “I told you so”.

Dale stayed over with Harry last night just because he could, and so got to witness Harry’s morning routine: get out of bed, be sick, shower, shave, dress, head out for work. Or he would’ve, anyway, if Harry actually got past the “be sick” stage.

“Dale?” Harry calls from the bathroom, more weak than he’d like.

“Yeah, Harry!”

“Can you call me out from work today?”

Soft footsteps in the hall, and then Dale’s there, looking down at where he’s still kneeling on the floor.

“I will, but I’m also calling Doctor Hayward.”

“Yeah. Okay.”

“Harry, it’s vitally important that you not consume any aspirin at this time.”

“Sure.”

He finally flushes the toilet and then moves just far enough to slump sideways against the side of the tub. He always throws up in the mornings anyway, but today it was red. He’s puking blood. Now he’ll die in a couple of years just like his dad did.

Maybe he should’ve let Dale drag him to the hospital that morning after his mental breakdown in the diner after all.

Harry sits for a few minutes, then gets to his feet and goes back into his bedroom. He should get dressed anyway if he’s going to have a doctor’s appointment. Jeans, belt, shirt, deodorant. It’s almost June but it’s also raining really hard this morning so he pulls on a flannel. His head hurts, he needs caffeine, he needs aspirin… Dale probably won’t let him have either of those things. He could drink more whiskey but he knows for damn sure Dale won’t let him have that and his phone, which Dale’s currently using, is right next to the door to the kitchen. So he can just sit on the end of his bed for now digging his fingertips into his temples.

And then he can hear Dale shouting into the phone.

“Good morning, Gordon! Yes, I’m fine! However I was wondering if you can give me a leave of absence! No, ABSENCE! Well, it’s a personal issue! I’m not sure, possibly as long as two weeks! Yes, I’ll explain more later once I have a better idea of what’s going on! Yes! Alright, thank you, Gordon!” Dale appears in Harry’s bedroom. “I managed to get you an appointment with Doctor Hayward approximately an hour from now. Harry, have you taken any aspirin?”

“No.”

“Excellent. Unfortunately you should also avoid coffee for the time being, as it’s acidic in nature.”

“Great.”

Harry gets sick again a few minutes before they leave for his appointment, which is horrible but also weird. Usually it just happens once and then stops. There’s definitely still blood in it. His headache is bad enough that when Dale insists on driving he doesn’t argue, mostly because now he can just sit in the passenger seat rubbing his face and being miserable. It’s because usually around this time he’s sneaking sips of whiskey at his desk… no wonder his head hurts more than normal.

Doc Hayward asks him a bunch of questions, and he’s not sure why but it makes him feel nervous. Dale sits next to him and holds his hand the whole time, and that helps. Then his boyfriend insists on speaking with Doc Hayward out in the hall, and a nurse is sent in to take a bunch of blood from him, and Harry starts to get scared. His dad started puking blood and then died. Now he’s going to die, too. They wouldn’t be taking all this blood from him if something wasn’t seriously wrong and he knows it. He’s going to die, soon, now.

Dale and Doc Hayward come back in.

“Harry… we’re going to admit you and run some more tests.”

Oh, god.

“Am I dying?”

“No, of course not-”

“Will, if I’m dying, you need to tell me,” Harry demands.

“You’re not dying,” he promises. “You’re just not healthy. We’re going to admit you and you’ll have a test called a barium meal up in radiology. I’ll call the station for you and let them know what’s going on so they know you’ll be here.”

Harry nods. “But you’re sure I’m not gonna die?”

“Harry, you’re having a panic attack,” Dale says quietly on his right.

Doc Hayward seems like he finally gets what Harry’s _really_ asking. “Harry, Frederick died of cirrhosis. It’s most likely you just have a stomach ulcer.”

After that he and Dale walk from the outpatient offices to the actual hospital. Harry absolutely doesn’t want to be here, because it means something is seriously wrong with him. Anxious people and hypochondriacs are sent home. He’s vomiting blood and they’re going to make him swallow radioactive crap so they can see why his guts are bleeding.

At least when they stick him in a patient gown they also give him pajama bottoms so he’s not just walking around in his underwear. They do kick Dale out for a minute when they come speak with him - he hasn’t eaten anything because he came here almost immediately after he woke up, which means they can do his imaging tests right away. First, even more blood gets taken, and Harry’s already sick of this. His damn headache has just gotten worse and his hands are starting to shake… he’d be throwing up again, too, but there’s nothing in his stomach.

A nurse comes in and puts him on an IV. Something about vitamins. Something about Ativan. Harry’s not interested and as soon as the fluid is getting into his veins he starts to care even less. The shaking stops, too, and he lies back in the patient bed as all his muscles relax. Dale’s still holding his hand.

“Alcohol exacerbates the symptoms of peptic ulcers,” his boyfriend says.

“Okay,” Harry mumbles.

“If they progress unchecked they may lead to peritonitis.”

“Okay.”

“It’s very likely you have this ulcer due to your excessive aspirin consumption.”

“Okay.”

“They’ll run this test to confirm that you do have an ulcer in your stomach, and afterwards you’ll be here for several days.”

“Okay.”

“Harry, you’re starting to experience withdrawals already. You have to stay here and go through detox.”

“Okay.”

“I’ll stay here, too. I’ll be here with you for the entire duration of your stay.”

“Okay.”

“Okay,” Dale whispers, brushing down his hair and then kissing his forehead. “You’ll be alright eventually, Harry, I promise.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Trigger warnings:  
> 1\. Overt homophobia is directed at Harry and Cooper from a newspaper article, which is deliberate libel accusing one or both of them of being HIV-positive as a form of character assassination.  
> 2\. Cooper is startled by a loud noise and has a minor trauma reaction.  
> 3\. Harry seeks medical attention after vomiting blood and is hospitalized for alcohol withdrawal syndrome while concurrently being tested/beginning treatment for a stomach ulcer.
> 
> So about the newspaper thing: this was the time period of the AIDS crisis. Something like this wouldn't make any sense today but back then it would've been a huge deal despite the fact that it's a blatant lie.
> 
> A note on the barium meal: Harry thinks to himself that he'll be swallowing "radioactive crap." He's wrong about this, the barium coats your GI tract to make it show up clearly on x-ray film. It's not radioactive on its own.
> 
> A note on stomach ulcers: they are often caused/exacerbated by three things which are very important factors in Harry's life. 1. Excessive aspirin consumption. 2. Excessive alcohol consumption. 3. Overbearing emotional stress. He's probably had one for awhile and just didn't notice until it started to bleed.


	14. It Could Still Be Worse

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm tired and in pain so this chapter is going up early so that I can stop thinking about it.
> 
> Trigger warnings in endnotes.

“Dale?”

“Yes, Harry.”

“What are they saying out in the hall?”

He watches Dale look.

“Harry, there’s nobody there.”

“Maybe they’re around the corner.”

Dale nods. “I’ll go see.”

Harry watches him. There’s nothing else for him to do except watch Dale right now. Yesterday after they did all the tests and labs on him they said: yes, he has a stomach ulcer, so he has to stop drinking and taking aspirin right away or else there will be a hole in his guts and he’ll get peritonitis. So now Harry’s stuck here for the next however many days suffering through withdrawals. At the moment, this is the longest he’s gone without throwing up since yesterday and he can’t decide if he wants the blankets on or off - he feels cold, but when he pulls them over himself he’s immediately boiling inside his own skin.

Dale comes back and sits beside him. “Harry, there’s nobody in the hallway,” his boyfriend informs him gently.

“But I can hear them talking.”

“Yes, I’m sure you can. It’s not real, there’s nobody there. Everything’s alright.”

Harry rolls onto his side, still facing Dale, and balls up the blankets against his chest. He just needs to hang onto something. He can hear people talking but Dale doesn’t believe him.

“Why don’t you believe me?” Harry whimpers.

He’s starting to cry again. He doesn’t want to, though, he’s so god damn sick of crying by now. Why does he have to be crying?

Dale strokes down his hair. “I do believe you. I know you can hear this happening. It’s just your mind trying to trick you. It thinks there’s someone there, but there really isn’t. It’s alright, Harry. You have absolutely nothing to worry about. Here.” One of his hands is picked up and rested on the side of Dale’s ribs. “Do you feel how fast I’m breathing?”

“…yeah.”

“Alright. I’d like you to try to breathe at the exact same speed as me, it may help you feel calmer.”

Harry does his best. He’s not sure if he actually gets it right, but hey, he’s trying. Then he starts to sweat. He curls into a ball because maybe that’ll hold him together, keep him in one piece. He can feel his heart banging on his ribs again. They’re talking, there’s just people talking, somewhere behind the walls. Are they talking about him? He can’t actually hear the words. Maybe they’re not speaking English… The only person he understands is Dale, who’s calling for a nurse. All Harry can do is lie there, holding his knees to his chest so that his heart can’t break out from behind his sternum as his hospital pajamas and the sheet under him get more and more soaked with sweat.

He’s injected with something.

The only reason Harry knows that is because he hears the nurse saying it to his boyfriend, how she’s putting whatever it is into his IV line. Things are a little less bad after that. He can get out of bed long enough to put on fresh pajamas, so long as he hangs onto Dale’s shoulder for balance. An orderly comes in to change the sheets and blankets. It feels so good to lie down again after, he’s tired, he can’t even say how much if someone asks him. He was awake all night panicking and crying so now he’s exhausted but he knows he won’t sleep.

* * *

“Dale, I can’t do this.”

“You can, it will lose some of its intensity soon.”

“Please let me go home,” Harry begs.

He tries to get up but he’s too dizzy and he’s shaking too hard. His ears are ringing now, too. He’s so dizzy. The whole bed is spinning with him on it. He’s so… oh, god. Harry just barely rolls over in time to lean slightly off the side of the bed and throw up all over the floor.

People come in. The nurses put on a new IV bag, take his temperature. He still has a fever. He’s had one since yesterday night. They check his blood pressure - it’s still too high. They give him the medicine for his stomach. The floor is cleaned up. He gets injected with things (he’s always getting injected with things these days). Dale is right on the edge of where he can see, pushed out of the way until all these _people_ leave them alone again.

“I need to go home,” he says again.

“Not yet. You have three or four more days to go, after that I’ll take you home,” Dale promises.

“But if I go home all this’ll stop,” Harry tries to explain.

His whiskey is at home. If he can have just one drink, maybe even just one sip, every single one of his current problems will be solved. He won’t have to keep throwing up or having nightmares about bugs and spiders and worms trying to crawl into his skin.

“Harry, you’ve been very sick for a long time. You’re here now so that you’ll be well again. All you need to do is wait. And I’m here, I’d like you to wait with me.”

But what are they waiting for?

“Why?”

“I desire very strongly to see you be healthy again.”

Harry looks around. He doesn’t know these walls, this isn’t his bedroom or his office. Where is he?

“Dale, where am I?”

“You’re in the hospital, Harry. It’s alright, you’re here with me, everything is fine. You’re safe.”

“But I have to go to work.”

“No, Harry, you’re called out sick from work. It’s alright.”

“I don’t know where I am.”

“You’re safe. You’re perfectly safe and you’re here with me… you’re exactly where you should be right now.”

“You fucked up,” his dad growls. “You weren’t where you were supposed to be.”

Oh, no. This is bad, it’s so bad, Harry just knows he’s going to get something thrown at him again. He covers his face with his arms.

“Dad, I’m sorry…”

“Why are you sorry?” Frederick demands.

“I wasn’t where I was supposed to be, I fumbled that play, I’m sorry,” he answers, as fast as he can. Maybe if he says it quick enough it’ll help, it’ll explain.

“You fuckin’ better be sorry for that.”

“I am, Dad, I’m sorry.”

“Y’know what happens to kids who’re bad at football?”

“What?” Harry’s so scared to know the answer, it must be something bad.

“They grow up to be sissy-boy faggots and they ain’t good for nothin’. So far your future is lookin’ pretty fuckin’ bleak the way you played out there today. Don’t you fuckin’ back up, I’m talkin’ to you, dammit!”

Harry wraps his arms around his head, tries to cover himself up as much as he can. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’ll do better next time!”

“Harry. Harry!”

His arms are pulled away and he cringes, but thank god, thank god, it’s Dale leaning over him. He’s in bed, he’s in his hospital room. His stomach is twisting up again and he’s so hot under this blanket, did he climb into a pool wearing his clothes and then immediately lay down after without drying off? No… it’s sweat. It’s always sweat. He feels disgusting and he grabs Dale’s wrists in his hands.

“Is my dad still here?”

“No, Harry, he hasn’t been here at all. You were dreaming.”

Oh. Well, that makes sense. His dad’s dead, after all. But Harry should really make sure, just in case.

“If he comes here, don’t let him see me. He’ll kick my ass for being like this.”

Dale nods slowly. “…alright, Harry. I won’t let him in.”

* * *

“I can’t see out the window,” Harry says. It’s scaring him. He has no idea what’s out there. There could be people watching. He doesn’t want to be watched.

“It’s raining out today,” Dale tells him, very unhelpfully.

“Is there anyone out there?”

“No, Harry, there’s nobody. We’re on the fourth floor, they wouldn’t be able to reach.”

“I need to look…”

Harry drags himself off the bed and staggers over to the window. He’s sweating again, he’s cold. He doesn’t want to stand. But he has to look. He _has_ to. He needs to make sure. Harry grabs the windowsill with one hand and clings to the IV pole with the other to keep himself upright. He stares through the blinds at the rain, at the parking lot. There’s nobody nearby but there are people moving around down there, he can see them, are they coming for him?

Harry starts shaking again and he can’t stand up. But Dale’s there, too. Dale catches him. Harry grabs onto his boyfriend and lets himself be walked slowly backwards until he’s on the edge of the bed. God, he feels like such shit, he’s never been this sick before. He can barely stay standing. He thinks Doc Hayward lied to him the other day.

“Coop, I’m gonna die.”

“No, you’re not. It won’t be as terrible tomorrow, you’ll start to improve soon.”

Dale sits next to him and hugs him. That’s nice. Hugs are nice.

“But I’m dying,” Harry insists.

“You’re not, though.”

“I am. I am.” He nods his head a bunch of times and gets dizzy. He’s too hot but his own sweat is like the worst kind of ice water. “I’m really sick, Coop.”

“You are, but you won’t be soon. You’ll begin to improve again.”

* * *

Another morning. Another nightmare. How many days has he been here? He’s not even sure anymore. They keep drugging him. He doesn’t always know where he is these days. But this morning is a little different, a little weird. He shouldn’t be hungry and he isn’t. His stomach always hurts and he’s still throwing up every other hour. But…

“I want a chocolate bar.”

Harry doesn’t eat candy (donuts don’t count) and he doesn’t even like chocolate. But he wants sugar. He can’t have any whiskey here so he really needs something sweet. Sugar. He’d rather have liquor but sugar will do. He just needs to get his hands on some.

“Harry-”

“Don’t fucking touch me.” Harry smacks Dale’s hand away. “I want a chocolate bar for breakfast.” Maybe then he can think clearly again.

“I’ll ask the nurses about it.”

No, oh no, Dale’s not in the room anymore and that scares him. There could be people looking in through the window and nobody’s around to warn him if they are. His heart is banging on the inside of his chest. He hates that feeling. Harry goes to the window but the sun is out and it’s too bright, he can’t see what’s going on. There’s probably people out there. He can still hear them whispering inside the walls sometimes.

Nurses. Dale. They come into the room. Harry flinches back when the nurses try to touch him. They talk at him, explain: he just needs dry clothes, that’s all. Dale stands and watches. How many times has this happened by now? Four or five times a day, he gets put in new pajamas because he can’t stop sweating. Clean bedding, too. They help him to lie back down and then change his IV. He gets the stuff that’s supposed to fix the hole in his stomach. What day is it? What time? Is it actually breakfast or did someone trick him?

The nurses leave again and Harry watches Dale smile at him before peeling open the candy bar. Harry makes a grab for it from the bed but he’s too far away. He wants to eat the whole thing all at once. Sugar. Sugar will help him feel better, maybe. Dale breaks it exactly along the lines and hands him a small piece from the first row. That’s all he’s getting. Harry wants to swallow it whole but he doesn’t. He sucks on it instead, letting it melt all over the inside of his mouth.

“Gimme one more.” He sticks his hand out.

“It might make you sick-”

“Gimme the damn chocolate, Dale.” It’s put in his hand. He sucks on that one, too. Sugar is good. Sugar helps. “I’m sorry I keep getting mad.”

“No, I don’t blame you. The process you’re going through is dangerous and excruciating.”

“I just really don’t want people touching me right now.”

“That’s alright, Harry.”

“No, it ain’t alright! The hell’d you think you’re doin’, pullin’ him like that?” his dad bellows.

“This stupid sport’a yours put him in the hospital, Fred! Frank’s knee was one thing, sixteen-year-olds shouldn’t have to have brain damage just because of a damn game!”

Harry watches from the couch. His head hurts and he’s dizzy. He doesn’t even remember the hit that downed him.

“Mom, I wanna keep playing,” he says.

This gets him the _you shut up or you’re going to get chewed out_ look from her. It sucks. He spent the last eight or nine years getting good at football and now his mom won’t let him play anymore. But it helps him, it makes him into more of a man, maybe even a man his dad can be proud of someday. He doesn’t want to stop playing. Frank’s knee was one thing - why? Why is that different? So what if Frank was in crutches for months? This is just his head, he doesn’t need crutches for that. He can keep playing. He _has_ to keep playing. It’s just his head.

“It’s just my head…”

“What’s wrong with your head, Harry?”

Oh. Dale’s here. He was hallucinating again. That’s the word Doc Hayward used for it, “hallucinating.” It seems like so far that’s a fancy term for him getting reminded of all the shit he was drinking to forget about in the first place. Mostly it’ll just be fragments, his dad reminding him over and over that he’s going to grow up and be a god damn faggot or either of his parents smacking him for getting too lippy with them about something. Once in awhile, it’ll be a more cohesive memory. It shouldn’t bother him so much. Every kid everywhere got slapped by their parents in the 50s and 60s. There’s nothing unusual about that.

“Where am I, Coop? Am I still there? How old am I?”

“You’re in the hospital, Harry. You were admitted for alcohol detox and treatment for a peptic ulcer. You’re forty three if I remember correctly. You’re safe.”

“But my parents aren’t here, right?”

“No, I haven’t seen them… and you don’t want them to be allowed in, correct?”

“…yeah. I don’t want to see them. They’ll get mad.”

Dale’s palm slips into his. “Why?” He’s so quiet and gentle. Harry doesn’t know how he’d get through this without Dale. “Did you do something to upset them?”

Harry snorts, sounding a little too weak. “Everything upsets them.” He shakes his head on the pillow. “It doesn’t matter anymore. It shouldn’t bother me this much.”

“Where are they, now?”

It takes him a second to remember. “My mother’s in a nursing home across the state. Frank’s with her.”

“And your father died.”

“Yeah. A long time ago.”

“Alright. Well, in that case, I don’t believe either of them will be coming to visit you anytime soon.”

“But if they do you’ll make sure they don’t come in, right?”

Dale’s other hand plays with his curls. “Of course I will.”

* * *

“We’re going to put you on trazodone once you’re discharged,” Doc Hayward says. “It’ll help you sleep better.”

“Am I leaving?”

“No, not yet. I’m going to keep you here until at least tomorrow, Dr. Jacoby’s going to speak with you about other medications and managing your problem so that you don’t have to go through this again.”

“I’m doing better, though,” Harry points out.

“Yes, you are. But if I send you home too soon you’ll probably just end up right back here again. Harry… based on the severity of your symptoms and the fact that they’re just now starting to subside, if you hadn’t been admitted you probably would’ve had seizures and died. This could’ve been so much worse for you than it has been.”

But this was so bad already. Harry can’t imagine it being any worse.

“Why do I have to talk to Dr. Jacoby?”

“Because you wouldn’t have gotten like this if there wasn’t something seriously wrong in your life. I spoke with Agent Cooper about this, too. He’s very worried about your emotional health.”

“He has no room to talk.”

“Maybe not, but he loves you very much and you gave him several scares over the last few days. You take good care of the town, Harry. You should be allowed to take care of yourself, too.”

“Where is Coop, anyway?”

“Oh, he said something about buying more candy bars, he’ll be back in a few minutes.”

“I love him,” Harry confesses. He looks at his hands. “I wouldn’t have been able to take this if he wasn’t here with me.”

“I know, that’s why I let him stay up here. That’s not normally allowed.”

“Thanks, Will.”

“You shouldn’t be so ashamed of your relationship with him. You don’t pick who you love, and I also know you’re smart enough to understand that.”

“I’m not ashamed,” Harry argues. “I’m just sick of the problem everyone has with it, that’s all.”

“You told me you love him and then looked like you expected me to yell at you for it.”

“Time was I would’ve been belted for something like that.”

Doc Hayward nods slowly and sits down across from Harry, setting aside his clipboard. “Sounds like you have something you want to get off your chest.”

“Aren’t you just going to make me talk to Lawrence anyway?”

“Well, it might be easier if you told me instead, then I could tell him for you. People tend to have a lot more trouble being honest with him than they do being honest with me.”

That makes sense. Harry doesn’t want to talk about this with Doc Hayward, but he just _can’t_ talk about this with Dr. Jacoby.

“You remember me playing football in school. It wasn’t… because I wanted to. My dad made me, ever since I was a kid. He thought it would… he thought it would stop me from being like… how I am now.” He can’t say it. He can’t say that word out loud. “I guess it didn’t work, huh? My parents never worried about this happening to Frank…”

“Have you ever talked about this with anyone before?”

“No.” Harry shakes his head. “I almost completely forgot until now.”

“He can’t hurt you anymore, Harry.”

“Maybe not, but I can’t unhear everything he said.”

“You can get beyond it eventually, though. You just have to be honest with Lawrence and take the medications he gives you.” Doc Hayward sighs and stands up from the chair. “But, there’s one other thing you need to do that I know you haven’t done yet.”

“What’s that?”

“Tell Cooper you love him.”

“The last person I said that to _died,_ Will.”

“There’s no relationship between the two. You should tell him, it’ll make him very happy.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Trigger warnings:  
> 1\. The entire chapter is a five- or six-day period of Harry suffering extensively from alcohol withdrawal syndrome in the hospital.  
> 2\. At points he experiences hallucinations, these force him to recall the child abuse he suffered that caused him to turn to alcohol in the first place (he was "drinking to forget").  
> 3\. There are memory sequences of verbal abuse. Some amount of physical violence at the hands of his father, who was also a notorious alcoholic, is heavily implied.  
> 4\. Harry is almost constantly suffering panic attacks and is very frequently physically ill.
> 
> There is now a short [companion fic](https://archiveofourown.org/works/24730381) showing what Cooper was REALLY up to while Harry and Doc Hayward were talking. He wasn't just out buying candy.
> 
> So I've been through withdrawals but it wasn't for alcohol. I actually looked up and carefully read a conglomerate of accounts by people as they suffered through this shit which gave me essentially a minute-by-minute playbook for how Harry would be feeling. When I went through withdrawals it was for dexmethylphenidate (an ADHD medication) because my scrip ran out and I couldn't get it filled in time due to a lack of insurance. My withdrawals did last a week, but they were nowhere near as bad as what happens when you quit alcohol. There's a reason Cooper was so desperate to get him admitted to the hospital.


	15. Epilogue - Six Months On The Wagon

Whenever Dale is home and not on a case, he’ll come along to guest-star in Harry’s therapy sessions.

Dr. Jacoby is alright with this, and sometimes Harry comes to Dale’s sessions, too. Harry’s are to make sure he doesn’t crawl back inside the bottle and Dale’s are to try and keep him from graduating to full-blown PTSD after the Black Lodge debacle. So far, both of them have been mostly doing okay. Whenever Dale’s out on a case he calls Harry every single night. When he’s home, they go running together in the morning before Harry goes to work.

Some nights, when Dale’s out of state, Harry does end up calling Albert. The first time, he sits there in silence for almost five minutes before Albert figures it out and starts talking at him, and it’s surprisingly not something mean: instead, it’s kind of a rough encouragement, reminding him he’s gone this long without hitting the sauce so he can keep going even longer. Eventually Albert even shares a story that the way he convinced himself to get sober was by saying over and over again that he’d quit drinking for twenty years and then after that he could start drinking again for another twenty. However many years since Albert went through detox, he has no intentions of ever going back to Scotch. Harry hasn’t needed to call Albert in over a month.

“Are you ready for this?” Dale asks from the passenger seat.

“Not a bit.”

“But Dr. Jacoby approves of and encourages this course of action.”

“Yeah.”

Harry glances over and his boyfriend looks way too concerned. “Harry… are you sure this is necessary?”

“She’s gonna die soon anyway, Dale. I’ll regret it a lot more if I don’t take this chance no matter how it turns out.”

They finally pull into Frank’s driveway. He invited them over for a couple days to spend Christmas with him on the other side of the state, and part of that means going to visit his and Harry’s mother in the nursing home. Harry hasn’t spoken to her in at least a couple of years and Frank hasn’t told her about Dale… they could be in for a very nasty surprise tomorrow afternoon. Dale, at least, understands this, and accepts it as a pretty distinct possibility.

“How was the drive?” Frank asks once they’re in the house.

“Long,” Harry grunts, kicking off his snow boots and hanging his coat on the hook by the door. “The roads were shit.”

“Excuse me, is that a pie?” Dale asks enthusiastically, looking at where Doris is working on the counter by the stove.

“It is. I hope you like cherry,” she answers.

“Oh, it’s my favorite.”

“Careful, he has a high standard,” Harry chuckles.

“I’m sorry if this sounds unusual, but would you mind if I observe the construction process of this particular pie? I always wanted to watch when my grandmother made them as a child but she would shoo me out of the kitchen for being underfoot.”

Doris looks startled. “Okay, that’s fine.”

Before Dale gets too absorbed, he turns to Frank again: “And there’s no alcohol in the house?”

“Nope. My son’s baby-sitting it for me right now.”

Harry groans. “Alright, look, you didn’t have to-”

“Harry if you finish that sentence I’ll do everything in my power to punish you for it,” Dale threatens, only half-joking, even as he stares at Harry’s sister-in-law preparing tomorrow’s dessert.

“Coop-”

The hand goes up. “Harry, please.”

He groans a second time and meanders into the den with his brother instead of trying to argue.

“Is he old enough to drink?” Frank asks quietly once they’re in the other room.

“He’s turning thirty one in April.” Harry reaches into one of his pockets and pulls out a chocolate bar so that he can suck on the individual pieces until they melt on his tongue.

“What’s with the hand-thing?”

“What hand-thing?”

“He looked like he was getting ready to take an oath or something.”

Harry snorts and they sit. “Well, he just does that sometimes. I asked him about it once and he said he used to flap his arms a lot as a kid, then it evolved into that because people thought it was less weird-looking. Frank, look. He’s just kind of an oddball, and he’s going to do things that startle you sometimes. Half the time, he doesn’t even know he’s doing it, so just don’t say anything to him about it. That’s all I ask.”

Frank makes a face at him. “And _this_ is the guy who got you to swear off women?”

“He’s usually a lot more charming than this, the road wore him out so now he’s kinda all over the place. I don’t blame him for that, either. We took turns driving and it was still fucking awful.”

That gets a nod. “Yeah, it’ll do that.” Frank pauses, which means he’s about to ask something uncomfortable. “I never really knew how to say this over the phone, Har, but awhile ago when we were talking about how the town kept calling me up and asking me to come back, why’d you lie to me? You could’ve asked for help, I would’ve helped you out if I could. You know that, right? Your boyfriend there called and asked me to stick all my booze someplace else for your stay here, I didn’t mind doing it.”

“My life was a mess,” Harry admits quietly after a moment. “And you’ve always had your shit together. You did all the things a man’s supposed to do with his life. But I-I never got married, and I had a drinking problem, and I never even knew I’m… how I am… until after I met Dale. How’m I s’posed to talk about that? Okay? How can I say any of those things to you when I could barely even think it in my own head? And I’ve always been the fuckup out of the two of us. I just got sick of feeling like one. So I couldn’t… Frank, it’s not because of anything you did or said. But after everything Dad said to me back when we were kids, I just… I couldn’t.”

“I wish you told me, though. Lucy called me and said you were in the hospital but she couldn’t give me a reason. It would’ve been nice to know why. I almost drove out there to see you… imagine how that would’ve gone.”

They both chuckle bitterly.

“So how’s Mom been?”

“Same, mostly. She knows you’re coming. I told her you’re seeing somebody, but that she can’t ask questions because it’s a surprise.”

“Jeez Louise, Frank, now she’s gonna have a heart attack tomorrow…” Harry shakes his head and chews on another piece of his chocolate bar. “What’s in your fridge?”

“Milk, soda, juice. I have coffee.”

“Great.”

Harry gets up and goes back to the kitchen, where he finds Doris engaged in a very lively conversation with his boyfriend about what precisely makes the cherry filling taste the way it does. Usually, Dale’s very professional and calm with people he doesn’t know, but Doris seems to be letting him actually be himself and it’s kind of cute. Harry pours two cups of coffee and hands one to Dale before returning to the den.

The rest of the evening is pretty quiet and getting up the next morning that doesn’t really change. They both take their prescriptions with coffee and then have a huge breakfast - since none of them are kids, there’s not really presents, so they stuff themselves with buttermilk pancakes instead. Dale’s back to acting calm and reasonable again since he’s not fried from being on the highway anymore, which is good because Frank clearly finds him more tolerable this way.

As the morning goes on Harry starts to feel nervous. His brother took a little bit of convincing on the whole him-being-in-a-relationship-with-another-man thing. His mother… she’ll either take a whole lot of convincing or she just won’t get convinced at all. But he has to do this, it’s part of his therapy, since most of why he drank was because of the way his parents were to him while he was growing up. This is a problem he needs to face.

Harry eats an entire chocolate bar on the drive to the nursing home.

As the three of them crunch through the snow in the parking lot, Dale grabs onto his hand for a second and squeezes through their gloves. “It’s going to be alright, Harry.”

Franks leads the way to Betsy’s room and Harry tells himself over and over again that he’s sweating because he’s wearing a winter coat and snowboots indoors. Nearby, Dale’s doing a surprisingly bad job of pretending he’s feeling less nervous than Harry.

They stand awkwardly in the doorway.

“Hi, Mom, merry Christmas,” Frank thankfully says, because Harry’s tongue is glued to the roof of his mouth.

She doesn’t say hello back - instead she’s eyeing Harry’s boyfriend, putting the pieces together right away. “A surprise, huh?”

“Mom, this is Dale,” Harry croaks.

Now, Betsy glares at his brother. “Franklin.”

“Mom-”

“You know I hate surprises.”

“Yeah, but-”

“And I hate them even more when they’re supposed to be surprising but they ain’t.”

“Mom,” Harry tries to say, and she holds up a finger, silencing him.

“I’ll get to y’all in a second.” She turns back to Frank. “Next time, be honest.”

“…okay.”

“Why are y’all still standing? There’s chairs right over there.”

Harry sits, but it’s mostly because she told him to. The idea wouldn’t have occurred to him if she didn’t.

“So it kinda looks like you shouldn’t have pulled him from the football team after all,” Frank tries to joke.

“That wouldn’a made a damn bit of difference.” She looks at Harry again. “Well? What do you have to say for yourself?”

“Um… it wasn’t on purpose,” is all he can come up with.

“You nice to him?” Betsy asks, addressing Dale now.

“Yes, ma’am.”

“You take care of him?”

“I certainly do my best, he doesn’t always allow me to.”

“You love him?”

“With all my heart.”

She nods. “Good. Then there’s no problem here that I can see.”

Well that… went a lot better than Harry was expecting.

“Guess she ain’t gonna kick your ass after all,” Frank says.

“Alright, now all y’all need to stop this whole song and dance right now. Frederick’s been dead for fifteen years, nobody’s getting beat for this.” Betsy shakes her head. “I can’t believe you two are still scared’a me, are lawmen always shaking in their boots when they see old ladies?”

“Mom, I just thought-”

“Harry. _I am your mother._ ”

“Yeah.”

“I always knew. I got over it a long time ago. Now, I wanna hear all about this nice young man’a yours. How’d y’all meet each other?”

Dale clears his throat. “Well, ma’am, I work for the Federal Bureau of Investigation. I was assigned to a murder case in Twin Peaks ten months ago…”

And it goes from there. Dale talks for almost fifteen minutes without stopping, describing their misadventures during the case and then ending up on a tangent about the food at the Double R. Following that is a lot of swapping war stories about cases they’ve all been on. After the three of them have been there for over two hours, they finally say goodbye to Betsy and go back to Frank’s house for a huge dinner and of course the pie Dale was so enamored with while it was being made last night. And Harry thinks he actually got a great Christmas present this year, which was that nothing went nearly as horribly as he was expecting.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So the thing Albert says about how he convinced himself to stay sober is actually how my grandma talked herself into giving up cigarettes :D
> 
> I debated long and hard about whether or not Harry's mother would still reject him but ultimately decided to cut the poor bastard some slack after everything else I did to him in this fic.
> 
> So I made Cooper's hand-up thing into a stim after a comment by a reader on a different fic, stating that whenever they write Cooper they just write him as them but without stims... it was a good conversation and I got inspired by that to make this into a stim for him so that he can be For Reals Autistic in this fic. That was like... one of two things I had to come up with to make him autistic. He already pretty much is on his own and you will never convince me otherwise.
> 
> So like... Harry has just a little bit of a twang when he talks? Like in one of the earlier episodes he pronounced "afternoon" as "afternewn". And then later on very subtly he says "dead" almost like "deyad" instead. I don't know exactly how he would come by this vaguely-almost-an-accent in the northwest and there's literally nothing in the Wiki about his mother so I made her southern. (They must've coached Michael Ontkean to talk this way, because he's from fucking Vancouver and there's no way he actually talks like that.)

**Author's Note:**

> Updates are on Mondays and Fridays.
> 
> All my Twin Peaks fics can be found [here](https://archiveofourown.org/works?utf8=%E2%9C%93&commit=Sort+and+Filter&work_search%5Bsort_column%5D=revised_at&include_work_search%5Brelationship_ids%5D%5B%5D=127943&work_search%5Bother_tag_names%5D=&work_search%5Bexcluded_tag_names%5D=&work_search%5Bcrossover%5D=&work_search%5Bcomplete%5D=&work_search%5Bwords_from%5D=&work_search%5Bwords_to%5D=&work_search%5Bdate_from%5D=&work_search%5Bdate_to%5D=&work_search%5Bquery%5D=&work_search%5Blanguage_id%5D=&user_id=Aaron_The_8th_Demon).
> 
> Comments are welcomed and encouraged :)


End file.
